Re-reading
Ali Moameri's solo exhibition of paintings and video, "Talk.See Projects", which opened at Sis Gallery on 21 November, presented itself to me less as a collection of discrete artworks than as a constellation of interwoven signifying systems: a network of signs whose intersections continually generate new layers of meaning.
At first glance, my attention was drawn to the paintings executed on worn 1,000-toman banknotes. Under present economic conditions, these notes have become almost worthless, a condition that functions as a powerful social signifier as much as an economic one. Collected from the microcosm of the taxi, they originate in a space where the circulation of money, the movement of bodies, and the exchange of stories unfold simultaneously.
Learning that the artist had painted the ancient archaeological mounds of his hometown onto these banknotes brought two radically different semiotic systems into collision: the exhausted economy of everyday life and the deep time of antiquity. It is precisely at this point of convergence that the work began to unfold for me. Archaeological mounds dating from the third and fifth millennia BCE are inscribed onto a banknote whose contemporary value has all but disappeared. These distinct temporalities coexist within the taxi, itself a uniquely urban stage where conversations, grievances, and fleeting narratives continuously emerge.
At first, this accumulation of signs resisted immediate interpretation. Yet, as I began to perceive the works as parts of an interconnected chain, their internal logic gradually became apparent. The exhibition's narrative takes shape through the overlapping voices that inhabit the taxi. The conversations heard in the accompanying video, marked by economic anxieties, everyday exhaustion, and personal concerns, merge with the visual structure of the paintings. Together, they reveal a reciprocal movement between collective subjectivity and the artist's own subjectivity, each continually informing the other.
My principal challenge, however, lay not with the paintings, the video, or even the taxi parked outside the gallery, which assumed a performative role, but with the printed reproductions of the paintings displayed in place of the original banknotes. For me, these reproductions inevitably alter the work's semiotic structure. When a reproduction of a devalued banknote replaces the original object as the carrier of meaning, part of the original network of significations is displaced. The distance between the original object and its reproduction thus becomes one of the exhibition's most consequential conceptual shifts.
The video opens with a view of the sky through the windshield of a moving taxi, while the ambient conversations between passengers and the driver, the artist himself, unfold in the background. Rather than functioning primarily as an image, the video operates for me as a linguistic field, a space in which individual acts of speech acquire meaning only through their relation to a broader social context. These utterances are inseparable from the cultural and linguistic framework of contemporary Iranian society. The anxieties, complaints, and ordinary conversations they contain can only be fully understood through familiarity with that shared social language.
For this reason, the video produced a powerful sense of synchronicity between my own lived experience and that of the passengers. What I heard felt immediately recognizable because I inhabit the same semantic universe. The work therefore generates not simply empathy but a form of shared meaning. Its primary significations emerge less from the moving image than from the voices themselves, voices saturated with the weight of everyday social life and embedded within a collective discourse of which I, too, am a participant.
The taxi used throughout the project is parked outside the gallery, with some of the artist's painting materials still inside. It functions as a secondary text that both refers to and extends the project. Yet the vehicle becomes legible as a sign only after reading the accompanying curatorial and artist's texts. Without them, it remains simply a taxi. Through the narrative they provide, however, the vehicle enters the exhibition's semiotic system, activating meanings that would otherwise remain dormant.
The artist's statement serves as the crucial bridge that transforms the taxi from a physical object into an active signifier. My understanding of why this particular taxi occupies the gallery's threshold emerged only after reading the text, and I found this sequence of interpretation especially significant.
In this sense, the artist's statement functions as a kind of "langue", the underlying code without which the individual "paroles" of the project remain dispersed and incomplete. Once the text is read, the paintings, the video, the sounds, and the taxi itself coalesce into a coherent structure. The parked vehicle thus exceeds its performative or installation function, becoming a structural node whose significance depends upon the network established by the work as a whole.
By the end of my encounter with "Talk.See Projects", the necessity of presenting multiple media in dialogue had become unmistakable. My experience was enriched precisely because the paintings, video, sound, and the physical presence of the taxi operated together rather than independently. Their coexistence allows the work to unfold across multiple registers, enabling meaning to emerge with greater complexity and depth.
Ultimately, what remained most compelling was the way these elements continually transformed one another. It is neither the image, nor the sound, nor the taxi itself that constitutes the work, but the dynamic relations among them. This oscillation between media continually displaces and expands meaning, allowing the work to remain fundamentally open, fluid, and in motion.