Through the Letters

During our residency at Organhaus in Chongqing in 2013, my wife, Negin Mahzoun, and I became increasingly aware of the unspoken similarities between Iran and China—not only culturally, but also through shared experiences of censorship, filtering, and limitations on expression.

Created as a collaborative project, we invited local artists to write words and short statements expressing prohibited or unspoken thoughts. We then borrowed their clothes and hand-painted the sentences onto the fabric in Persian. Transformed into an unreadable language, the words could publicly exist without threatening their authors, while simultaneously offering a temporary sense of freedom through concealment and displacement.

The clothes presented in the exhibition carried the thoughts of Chongqing artists in a language inaccessible to their surroundings before being returned to their owners at the end of the exhibition.

Through the Letters, China, 2013 © Tooraj Khamenehzadeh