Watching the governance of objects_ Recycle Bin

Watching the Ruling of Things, Sazandegi Newspaper Issue 93+64, 21st June, Tehran, Iran (2018).

Maryam Kouhestani sold her house objects in the form of a work of art for 33 cents in a video-arrangement called “Recycle Bin” 

Part I: Zahedan, Childhood 

The corridor that connects the past to the present. 

For hours, she has been arranging small and large objects that she has gathered around her in solitude. Others think that children play in this way, but this is not a game; it is an instinctive attempt to protect their existence from the storm of time, even though the arrangement of the objects is by itself the result of the storm of time. 

Fourteen years old, Zahedan, noon, heat, wandering alone in the street, and seeing and picking up a small plastic hand. To avoid feeling lonely, she becomes fond of the hand that is hidden in the gown’s pocket, and the story begins. Thousands of pieces of small and large objects that she thinks she has given them color and meaning no longer belong to her and speak of the presence of something that is not real but is more decisive than the present reality, and each has a world of memories of her and their previous owners. 

The fact is that the video-arrangement “Recycle Bin” has taken the form of revelation, willingly or unwillingly. It is an attempt to dominate the past that changes its shape even in a steel mold, and the choice of a platform including a trellis and a space covered with tall fabrics is reminiscent of the tent houses that the artist built as a child to shape her own world. In her 2 

view, these objects carry the heavy burden of days, months, and years that were past, have been past, and are past. 

In addition to holding dozens of solo and group sculpture exhibitions inside and outside Iran, Maryam Kouhestani was curator and executive director of the first national exhibition of contemporary visual arts of Afghanistan in Tehran entitled “Nimroz” (Midday) in 2017 and has been curator of several exhibitions of ceramic sculptures of Afghan girls in Tehran. Her interest in Afghan art comes from her childhood because she was born and raised in Baluchistan. She had many Afghan friends at school, and she traveled at the age of 18 to this country for the first time as an aid worker with the Red Cross team during the US-Taliban war. On the 8th and 9th of June 2018, she exhibited the video-arrangement “Recycle Bin” in Mohsen Gallery because she thinks that today, human voice has unfortunately become weaker than the sounds of objects. Everything has become a commodity, even tones, senses, and thoughts. In fact, for Maryam Kouhestani, objects are the heirs to the earth, the land where she was born, and she gives up everything even if she wants to return to the world. 

Part II 

Kitchen and bedroom furniture taken from thought, an alternative to feeling and intuition. 

According to thinkers and philosophers, the contemporary man takes refuge more than ever in objects, belongings, and the world around in a fruitless and round-the-clock effort on the path of immortality to be unique, separate, and different. He makes sense in relation to a world that is full of abstract signs and physical objects. In other words, man understands the secrets of existence, broadens vision, strengthens the senses, creates memories, defines social classes, organizes collective life, makes culture, buys values, and sells values in connection with these signs and objects. Due to the huge growth in the number of objects that can be obtained by 3 

money, a lot of importance is given to money and the qualitative nature of objects loses its importance through the monetary economy. Ultimately, only quantitative values meet our needs to the extent that the world of signs and objects dominates man who reaches a stage where he no longer has a heart and emotional relationship with the objects and the world around him. He becomes an object that not only loses its own space but also represents the concept of consumption to others, and this forms the tragic existence of modern man whose art even steps in the path of the material life of bourgeois society. 

Man often forgets that even among economically traded objects, there are still aspects that money does not represent. Accordingly, women also struggle impatiently while suffering the fever caused by modern life defilement because of losing their feminine spirit. A big gap like a wound appears inside them that even reaching opportunities and rights equal to those of men does not heal. By drowning in the industrial and capitalist system, they turn away from the desire for something that brings man closer to his existential principle or, in a sense, to himself. The video-arrangement “Recycle Bin” represents the artist’s efforts to get closer to her feminine nature by bringing out the objects belonging to the private space of the house that is, as the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard argues, a home and a space in which one takes refuge to not lose himself. It is a corner of the world that is connected to the beliefs, memories, imaginations, dreams, and future and includes art, faith, and politics. By displaying all of the objects with an arrangement indicating that they are sold at a low price, she gives them a symbolic status so that the objects are not considered as the other, but the present existence is considered as the other who has changed from one form to another. The artist’s shadow is waiting to put aside various masks and the past on which she should be no longer dependent. She is a woman who says “on the 14th of February 2010, I turned around in the empty volume of my body and found no sign of any amazing thing to approach a healing miracle; I found only a big bear and a dark forest.” 4 

The primitive man who had just become acquainted with objects looked at them very ingenuously. Then, he depicted them as a symbol and gradually the object gave meaning to its position by its gradual and even revolutionary transformation so that the discovery and knowledge of the rule of playing with objects became the key to the literary, artistic, and philosophical approach of man to existence. In the work of Maryam Kouhestani with arranged objects, the artist’s personal memories more prevail over the collective feelings and perceptions than what could be seen in the past. The audience’s mind is struggling with the challenge between money and the artwork, which is gradually becoming something fixed among various activities to come close to believing that the roots are evident in the objects. Objects remember their roots and the capitalist system is no longer able to conquer man. Rather, the object as an artwork engages the audience with the time that has been recorded and frozen in the object. It may not be possible to return to it anymore, but the audience can make time turn back by the phenomenal, sensory, and perceptual connection that they establish with the object. The face of the artist can be changed and a new narrative can start. 

Part III 

Guest room 

The guest room is where people and objects interact with other people and objects. The object is no longer the same object and the human is no longer the same human. Man and his nature have been studied by many thinkers, and if we do not separate human beings because of their skin color, gender, social class, nationality, culture, and so on and do not price them based on their high or inferior quality, we conclude that human beings are one and live in the cycle of existence. In fact, all human beings are connected to each other. They make sense in relation to others and have no meaning alone. The great difference between human beings and inanimate objects is the soul which has created a huge world of meaning in the universe from 5 

the past to the present, and this has led man to turn to conceptual art to improve and transform his surroundings over time in the modern age. It can be said that this kind of art considers material tools as insignificant, perishable, and far from aesthetics and offers a meaning deeper than the appearance and form to the audience of the artwork. 

By going back to the past and selling objects along with the memories pinned to them at the same price, Maryam Kouhestani frees the objects from the shackles of physics and form and establishes this concept in the audience’s mind that everything has the same value. By moving away from gender and empowering objects, she puts the audience at a stage where all inanimate objects are of equal value. A shabby pot that stands out next to a clean and eye-catching piece of furniture presents a different concept of art and life. It gives life to an object that creates art once again in the hands of the audience who starts a new story and may identify with the artist’s pain. As she states, pain can be relieved by nothing but the miracle of escaping from prison, something like a sudden collapse of the ground below one’s feet or a sudden collapse of a wall, which depicts another beautiful world. Although the past is always alive and every time it takes on a new form, we can forgive it while the past does not forgive us. Is this not something in itself?