Stones
Navid Salajegheh
- Period
- 2018
- Location
- Lajevardi Foundation, Tehran
Project Overview
Stones is a three-part exhibition conceptualized by Navid Salajegheh in 2016 and realized in March 2018 at the Lajevardi Foundation. Its three components — Selecting (video), Pull and Release (interactive installation), and Play (performative installation) — each mapped out a distinct way of interacting with a single core material: natural stones collected from riverbeds surrounding Tehran. This entry focuses specifically on the interactive installation Pull and Release, an apparatus where visitors could pull a suspended handle connected to an axial pulley system to lift the stones vertically, directly experiencing their raw weight, movement, and the sound of them colliding with one another.
Context & Site
The choice of the Lajevardi Foundation as the venue was largely dictated by the strict physical requirements of the artwork itself. The installation demanded an expansive room with high ceilings where visitors could move around comfortably and linger. Pull and Release was intentionally positioned in a high-traffic area of the foundation so that its suspended handle naturally invited people to interact with it without requiring explicit explanatory signage. The title of the piece, Pull and Release, served as the sole indicator of its participatory nature.
Participation & Process
Defining the exact nature of participation in this piece is central to understanding the work. Salajegheh clarifies that interaction here was not designed around social engagement, dialogue, or collective organizing. Instead, it offered an individual, physical encounter between a single human body and a closed mechanical system.
The mechanism operated quite simply: the stones hung suspended in a state of counterbalanced equilibrium. When a visitor pulled the handle, they introduced external physical force into the system, lifting the stones along a vertical axis. In the text written to accompany the installation, the relationship between the viewer and the apparatus is described as follows:
Working with a closed system always requires a kind of initial assessment. An evaluation of our own capacity, in relation to the predetermined, quantified capacity of the system. We then arrive at a moment of confirmation; we now know how and under what conditions our body, with its dimensions, scale, and weight, can enter into interaction with the closed system.
Participants found themselves repeating a singular, rhythmic physical movement over a short period, pitting their bodily strength against the counter-tension of a wire cable holding the heavy stones. Without this external human energy, the system remained completely static. Furthermore, at the end of every pull, the displaced stones dropped back down, returning almost perfectly to their original baseline configuration — meaning the net structural change left behind neared zero. What remained was a purely tactile and sonic exchange. The project was tailored for an audience attuned not just to what art represents visually, but to how it is experienced physically.
Motivations & Questions
Salajegheh views Stones as part of a specific phase in his practice that he terms a phenomenology of the working material. Within this conceptual framework, the river stone was selected as a basic unit of experience, with the underlying goal of constructing a "second nature" for it — a state that could be viewed as a continuation of its natural environmental lifecycle:
From this perspective, the exhibition championed a sense of harmony with the natural world, functioning as an act of praise for nature. In the accompanying text for Pull and Release, the artist explains this harmony through the ideas of resonance and modulation: the time that unfolds inside the gallery space as visitors interact with the stones — speeding up their artificial wear and tear — resonates directly with the vast stretches of time required for natural riverbeds to erode rocks into smooth, rounded pebbles and sand. If the apparatus were given infinite time and human force to endlessly grind the stones against one another, the distinction between the closed mechanical loop and the open natural world would dissolve entirely.
The exhibition rejected a single, linear interpretation, opting instead to offer multiple vantage points. Its three-part architecture was not organized as a classic trilogy (where a final piece resolves the first two), but rather mirrored the non-linear structure of Jorge Luis Borges's short story The Garden of Forking Paths, where each component functions as a coexisting, intersecting pathway through a shared thematic space.
Moving them, grinding them, rolling them over one another, and everything else the exhibition and the performance enacted upon the stones, had also already happened to them at the pre-exhibition stage, in the bed of the river. What took place in the exhibition space was only the human continuation of that same natural transformation.
Conditions & Negotiations
Salajegheh does not note any institutional pushback, censorship, or cultural resistance regarding this project. Major constraints were logistical and financial.
The series was fully finalized in 2016, but the artist spent two years searching for a venue willing to host it. The eventual offer from the Lajevardi Foundation came with a specific condition: the exhibition had to be structured as a joint collaboration pairing an Iranian artist with an international one. This requirement was fulfilled by integrating a site-specific sound piece by Leonie Roessler that operated in direct dialogue with Stones. Had this specific opportunity not materialized, the series likely would not have been shown at all — especially since Salajegheh's artistic focus shifted significantly following this show (beginning with his subsequent project, Mass in Motion).
Documentation
Collaborators & Support
The exhibition was curated by Amirali Ghasemi at the Lajevardi Foundation, featuring a companion sound piece created by Leonie Roessler. The project was realized entirely independently and funded out of pocket by the artist. The venue, the curator, and the collaborating sound artist all participated without receiving or charging any production fees.
Further Resources
Amir Ali Ghasemi, "Stones; A Distance Conversation," Exhibition Catalog, Lajevardi Foundation, 2018.
Navid Salajegheh, In Search of a Poetics of Distance, 2021 (includes a short critical text on Stones) (in Persian).
About the Artist
Navid Salajegheh is an artist, architect, lighting designer, and writer whose practice during the creation of Stones was heavily focused on the phenomenology of the working material. A graduate in architecture and urban design with degrees from Tehran, Marseille, and Paris, he worked professionally within urban design and architecture firms in France from 2007 to 2014.
He initiated his fine arts practice in the early 2000s, focusing on developing novel fabrication and display methods within complex spatial installations. His work incorporates collage, sculpture, technical drawing, film, and performance.
His projects often draw inspiration from found objects, personal memories, and broader historical and geographic dialogues. By heavily manipulating these raw materials through a process of creative translation, he extracts abstract forms from their original contexts. Within his formalist approach, structural outcomes are rarely static or completely finalized; instead, importance is placed on the transformative path the raw material undergoes. Because his exhibitions present numerous variations of a single concept, the act of repetition has become an essential element of his artistic style.
Website: navidsalajegheh.tumblr.com
This entry was prepared based on the artist's account and accompanying project materials.