Reza Aramesh | "To Be Made Flesh Again (after James Baldwin)": Dastan's Basement

Reza Aramesh: "To Be Made Flesh Again (after James Baldwin)"Reza Aramesh works across sculpture, drawing, embroidery, ceramics, video, and performance, often presented as a sequence of Actions. His practice responds to media coverage of international conflicts from the mid-20th century to the present, translating

transient images of violence into enduring sculptural form.

Working primarily in marble and frequently with non-professional models, Aramesh stages reenactments based on selected photographic sources. In these transformations, direct references to war recede, leaving figures removed from their original contexts and generating a deliberate tension between beauty and brutality.

Situating these works within the framework of Western art history, Aramesh examines how the male body has been represented and coded through intersecting lenses of race, class, and sexuality.

"To Be Made Flesh Again (after James Baldwin)" brings together two new bodies of work: "Study of the Head as Cultural Artefacts" (marble and bronze sculpture) and "Study for Fragment of the Self" (marble sculptures and drawings). Across these series, Aramesh focuses on the sculptural fragment as both a formal and conceptual device. The broken body becomes a means to question ideas of wholeness and visibility, while also proposing resilience and continuity. The exhibition’s title references Baldwin’s reflections on embodiment in "The Fire Next Time" (1963), where he argues that truth and experience must be made real through the body to possess moral weight. Baldwin often used the idea of "flesh", not in a religious or sentimental sense, but as a way of saying: truth, pain, and love only matter when they are "felt" and "lived through the body". Ideas or ideals are meaningless if they don’t touch the real, vulnerable, physical human experience. This idea parallels Aramesh’s process of translating images of conflict into physical matter. The act of “being made flesh again” suggests the reconstitution of presence after violence or erasure, a return to humanity through material form. Through this lens, Aramesh’s marble fragments engage questions of representation, empathy, and endurance. His practice underscores the transformation of mediated imagery into a physical encounter, positioning the body as both witness and site of renewal.