“From where I stand, I see ashes. The ground is as I’ve known it, yet it is hard to see what will become of the ones born out of this blackness.”
In May the Tree No Longer Burn When I Wake, Amir Khojasteh presents his first body of work developed after leaving his home country, Iran. During this time the Persian garden* stood out to him. A garden in a barren land protected by walls resonated deeply with his experience of departure and distance. In his last show Living in a Burning House, his position was that of an insider. Now he speaks from a distance. “I am standing on a hill and watching the fire slowly settle. What remains is ash, the solid remnants that are left behind by the flames,” he says. Ash is conceptually present in the show, suggesting destruction while simultaneously enabling new forms.
A storyteller at heart, Khojasteh unfolds a narrative within the exhibition space through paintings, sculptures, and installations. If we imagine the walls of the gallery as those that enclose a Persian garden, we enter a twisted vision of such a space: a garden with windows overlooking a doomed landscape. Figures lie leisurely, limbless and powerless, gazing outward at the scenes beyond. Soft bodies sit upright along the walls, wearing quiet, senseless smiles.
The doomed landscapes are inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows (1890). The work resurfaced in the artist’s mind during the Woman Life Freedom movement (2023, Iran). The broken horizon, the paths that lead nowhere, the crows as dark interruptions, and the charged, unstable colors drew him to this image as a reflection of his surroundings. He stretched the painting, covered it, and reworked it until he could make his own version of it. His work has long revolved around figures and faces, but here there is no single focal point to hold the eye, only a continuous surface repeatedly marked by the artist’s hand, leaving visible traces across canvases and sculptures.
At the center of the space, reclining figures lie on the floor. Their origin goes back to the tradition of idealized Renaissance marble sculpture, bodies historically associated with masculinity, perfection, and authority. Yet in clay these bodies soften. Born again through the artist’s hands, they become mutable and reshaped. The seated figures placed on the walls draw from a similar lineage. Their posture echoes the body language of a man seated on a throne, a familiar gesture of authority. Yet here too, that authority dissolves. As the forms change and soften, their position within the narrative becomes uncertain.
Their ambiguous smiles and soft, fingerprinted bodies invite conflicting interpretations. Are they figures of former power, the ones who caused the chaos and the fire, now lying and quietly smiling at what they have done? Or are they bodies born from the ashes themselves, exhausted and stripped of agency, left only to stare? Rather than fixed symbols of authority or absurdity, these figures remain suspended between roles, blurring the line between ruler and witness, perpetrator and survivor, leaving their place in the story unresolved. The sculptures hold the uncertainty at the center of the exhibition and raise the question of what kinds of bodies emerge after the fire.
In this landscape of aftermath, nothing is fully resolved. Making and unmaking occur at the same time. The works remain suspended in the moment after the fire, when the smoke has cleared but the future has not yet taken shape.
-Yasaman Nozari
*
Historically, a Persian garden is imagined as an earthly paradise within the harsh climate of the desert. The garden establishes order through enclosure. Its walls separate inside from outside. Within them, life is watered, maintained, and carefully sustained.
