Not Yet Gone: Group Exhibition

Not Yet Gone brings together seven artists based in Iran whose practices share an interest in images that resist closure. Rather than functioning as stable records of the past, photographs become places where different moments, memories and unrealized futures continue to overlap. The image becomes less a document of what has been than a material, perceptual and temporal field where past, present and unrealized futures continue to intersect.

The exhibition unfolds through the framework of hauntology, a term introduced by Jacques Derrida and later expanded by cultural critic Mark Fisher as a way of understanding the persistence of unrealized futures within the present. Hauntology suggests that we are never inhabited solely by what is here, but also by what failed to arrive, what disappeared too soon, and what continues to linger as possibility. As contemporary culture increasingly turns toward repetition rather than invention, the future no longer appears as a horizon of progress but as an echo of unrealized potential.

Although photography lies at the core of every practice in Not Yet Gone, none of the artists approaches it as a finished or self-contained medium. Together, they refuse photography's promise of certainty. Rather than accepting the photograph as objective evidence or a fixed record, each artist transforms it through a distinct material and conceptual language. Some alter perception itself; others intervene in the photographic surface through cutting, staining, reconstruction or weaving. Elsewhere, the photograph leaves the picture plane altogether, becoming sculptural, spatial or materially responsive. Across the exhibition, photography is understood not as an endpoint, but as a process that continues to evolve through perception, material and time.

Shahin Esfandiari and Kimia Askarian begin this transformation at the moment of seeing. Esfandiari dissolves natural forms into fields of color, light and atmosphere, allowing perception to hover between photography and painting, while Askarian extends the photographic instant through movement and duration, producing images in which landscape and architecture gradually dissolve into rhythm, color and light. Neither seeks to describe the visible world as much as to reveal the instability of perception itself.

For Omid Mehdizadeh, Sina Boroumandi and Alborz Kazemi, the photograph continues to evolve long after the shutter is released. Mehdizadeh prints on cotton before subjecting the surface to staining, abrasion and natural pigments, allowing the image to accumulate its own material history. Boroumandi cuts and physically reshapes photographic paper, transforming the print into a sculptural form whose folds and tensions become inseparable from the image it carries. Kazemi fractures photographs through cutting and reassembly, producing unstable forms in which absence becomes as significant as what remains visible. Across these practices, photography ceases to be a fixed object and instead becomes something altered by time, process and touch.

Arya Tabandehpour and Rana Heidarzade extend this transformation beyond the photograph itself. Tabandehpour dismantles images only to weave them back together, replacing the illusion of a continuous photographic surface with a structure built from crossings, intervals and intersections. Heidarzade suspends photographs within translucent resin forms that shift with light and the movement of the viewer, allowing images to drift between object and atmosphere. In both practices, photography escapes the flatness of the printed image and begins to occupy physical space.

Across the exhibition, temporal and material boundaries begin to dissolve. Images drift between document and invention, memory and projection, certainty and speculation. Rather than offering fixed narratives, they remain open, allowing different histories, experiences and imagined futures to coexist within the same frame.

Ultimately, Not Yet Gone proposes photography not as evidence of what has been, but as something still becoming. Each artist redefines the medium in a different way, yet together they reveal the photograph as a living, unstable form—one that continues to shift through memory, material, perception and time. If hauntology asks what lingers after the future fails to arrive, Not Yet Gone suggests that images, too, are never entirely complete. They remain unfinished… continually unfolding…