Re-reading
Talk.See Gallery is an ongoing project initiated in 2019 that transforms a taxi into a mobile gallery where people can talk ("Talk") about art and experience ("See") it. During the project's early phase, the artist, who drove the taxi himself, began drawing on the banknotes he received from passengers as payment for their rides.
Gradually, these sketches on circulating banknotes developed into deliberate drawings and paintings on 1,000-toman notes. The choice of this particular denomination is significant: its reverse side depicts Mount Damavand, an image that resonates with the artist's enduring engagement with environmental concerns and the landscapes of his ancestral village.
Until they reach their destination, passengers are, in the artist's own words, "condemned to look at artworks whose value the art world so passionately champions." Even a flicker of curiosity often prompts questions, giving rise to the very exchange the artist seeks: direct, unmediated conversations with people of different ages, social backgrounds, and belief systems, unfolding across countless journeys, places, and moments in time. Conventional gallery audiences tend to represent a relatively narrow demographic, most often the urban middle class, leaving many "ordinary" people outside the habitual circuits of contemporary art. Galleries rarely deny this reality, and some openly acknowledge the elitist character often associated with visual art.
Rejecting this exclusivity, many artists have sought to relocate the production and presentation of art into public space and the rhythms of everyday life. A gallery, of course, is not a private institution. Its doors are open to the public. Yet an open door does not necessarily guarantee accessibility. By an unwritten code, entering the sanctified and often mystified world of art through the gates of galleries and museums seems to require familiarity with a particular etiquette. Without it, visitors can easily feel out of place or excluded. Countless anecdotes testify to this discomfort, from visitors mistaking elements of installations for refreshments to other moments of unintended transgression. More fundamentally, the atmosphere of the white cube often disciplines our behavior, discouraging us from asking the seemingly naïve or "wrong" questions that naturally arise before an artwork.
Talk.See Gallery suspends these conventions. Passengers are freed from the intimidating atmosphere of the institution and from the watchful gaze of audiences who sometimes appear more invested in a cultural performance than in the artworks themselves. Inside a taxi, no one is expected to offer an informed interpretation of contemporary art. Passengers simply wish to reach their destination, having never intended to encounter an exhibition at all. Under these conditions, conversation unfolds with remarkable ease. Speaking with a taxi driver who also happens to be an artist, and who approaches each encounter with humility and genuine curiosity, proves far more inviting than crossing the threshold of an unfamiliar gallery.
"Are you a driver or a painter?" "Why paint on a 1,000-toman note?" "Where is this landscape?" "If these works look so similar, why are their prices different?" Through such informal, disarming questions, passengers gradually enter the conceptual framework of Moameri's practice and the relationships embedded within it. This pedagogical dimension, entirely unfamiliar to many of his passengers, is as central to the project as its formal and conceptual concerns.
Rendered nearly worthless by decades of inflation, the 1,000-toman banknote has largely lost its purchasing power. Through the artist's intervention, however, it re-enters circulation within the economy of art, accompanying passengers as they leave Talk.See Gallery. The works are intentionally priced to remain accessible, allowing members of the broader public, rather than only established collectors, to participate in this exchange.
The purpose of this project is not to diminish the role of galleries or to privilege one mode of presentation over another. Indeed, many artists have produced and exhibited work beyond institutional spaces, only to later present the documentation of those practices within galleries themselves, as was the case with the exhibition of Talk.See Gallery at Sis Gallery. Rather, the project invites us to imagine more expansive and plural forms of artistic address: emancipatory possibilities that open alternative circuits of exchange, participation, and meaning beyond the dominant structures of the contemporary art world.