EYES, COME BACK  

We cordially invite you to EYES, COME BACK – a staged exhibition by Setareh Shahbazi with Mirene Arsanios, Haytham el-Wardany, Ann-Kristin Hamm, Nancy Naser Al Deen, Sama Ahmadi, Reihaneh Mehrad, Sedami Gracia Elvis Theodor Ophelia Azilinon, Malonda, and more.

Setareh Shahbazi is the 2024/2025 recipient of Wi Di Mimba Wi – a commission prize by  AKB-Stiftung & SAVVY Contemporary. EYES, COME BACK is a solo show that pushes against the contained vision of an artist as a singular body or as a singular creator. Instead, the exhibition unfolds as an evolving collaborative inquiry into memory and its ruptures, forging a collective gaze through which to look upon the world and ourselves. In doing so, EYES, COME BACK becomes both a meditation on remembrance and a refusal to forget.

In a historical moment when the facades of democracy crumble across the West, Shahbazi’s work holds a critical urgency, channelling the disruptive spirit of the trickster and the power of an interconnected gaze. Speaking and seeing in dream states, with the saturation of lives lived in between peripheries, Shahbazi’s practice invites us to squint and stare into the murky depths that connect the struggles of Tehran to Beirut, Beirut to Berlin, and far beyond. 

INTERWOVEN SENSING: FRACTURES, FLASHBACKS, FLICKERS

The show’s title draws from a Native American story Shahbazi has long carried with her: a tale in which a coyote, an archetypal trickster, meets an old man in the desert who throws his eyes into a cottonwood tree to see from above, calling them back with the words, "Eyes, come back." The coyote learns the ritual, excited by its widened vision and repeats it until, through overuse, it loses its eyes to the tree. Struggling without sight, the coyote borrows a mouse's and a bull's eyes, navigating the world through a multiplicitous gaze. Versions of this story are told across Indigenous oral traditions of the Ute, Pueblo, and Warm Springs peoples of North America, each bearing lessons on perception and the perils of self-serving motives over interdependent ways of being. 

The story offers a conceptualization of sight and vision as deeply layered: spiritual, emotional, relational, and harkening to an interwoven mode of sensing – a gaze weakened when it strays too far from the communal body, a gaze re-made and re-strengthened by the collective. This multi-bodied, interwoven mode of seeing that the story invokes is akin to the one Setareh Shahbazi forges in her work. Playing with polymorphous perception, Shahbazi creates a direct antithesis to technologies of sight that exist as forms of neocolonial and imperial domination. The oppositional eyes in the trees of our times are the drones supervising the ongoing destruction of Palestine, Kashmir, Sudan, Yemen and further communities made vulnerable by mutating inheritances of empires; the online monitors and the cameras aimed at dissenters in the metropole heart of Berlin; the internet censors blacking out and controlling what is visible in Tehran. Within these contexts of visualization as control and erasure, Shahbazi's work intervenes within dominant regimes of seeing.

Shahbazi’s manifold ways of seeing do not immediately offer high-definition coherence or transparency. The artist works instead with the language of the subconscious as it meets with the conscious and the much-mediated nature of memory, blurring the real into the surreal, inciting disorientation so as to move towards re-orientation. Weaving together photography, digital montage, archival materials, drawing, and installation – often through transdisciplinary formations – Shahbazi’s practice holds space for what cannot be resolved: the fractured, the flashback, and the flickering. The work often begins with a collection of images composed of private archives, film stills, postcards, snapshots, newspaper clippings, and photographs taken by the artist herself. Yet, these images undergo a transformation, shifting form through layered reconstructions and manipulations. In this realm, image, identity, and place emerge not as fixed constructs but as mutable processes where multiplicities – of peoples, places, temporalities – enjoin. 

A GAZE RE-ASSEMBLED, CO-ASSEMBLED

EYES, COME BACK offers an alternate vision and entry into Setareh Shahbazi’s practice. Older works surface in new forms, fragmentary and re-shaped. They are “re-membered”, in the sense that Toni Morrison evoked: by recalling and re-assembling what has been dismembered. Memory is re-configured and co-configured. We invoke Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali here too, who wrote in his poem “Farewell”: “My memory gets in the way of your history.” Shahbazi expands the poet’s statement, inviting us all to create collective memories that get in the way of the oppressor’s history.

The center of EYES, COME BACK is shaped by a photograph Shahbazi has held for many years, one in which three patterned planes collide inside a shrine of surrealist distortion. Across the exhibition space, the apparatus of the show, its inner gears and cogs, are decidedly made visible with wooden planks, buckets of paint and cardboard backings revealing themselves, to showcase the labour of its building. Shahbazi insists we do not forget the frames of what is constructed behind the scenes of our making, both within the context of exhibitions and the formation of our memory.

EYES, COME BACK is fastened together by this scenographic intervention – which itself fastens together different arcs of collaborative creation. Artistic proposals and activations by Shahbazi’s collaborators frame and form each stage, superimposing and layering meanings. Nancy Naser Al Deen and Sama Ahmadi translate Shahbazi’s scenography into the SAVVY space, building the architecture and framing for these superimpositions. Gatherings and performative interventions invite embodied, collective presence, hosted by Haytham el-Wardany, Malonda, and Reihaneh Mehrad and Sedami Gracia Elvis Theodor Ophelia Azilinon – the latter duo sustaining presence within the exhibition through their respective installations in the space. Ann-Kristin Hamm’s brushstrokes absorb and blur presence and remembrance; Mirene Arsanios’s voice fills the space, interrogating doom as well as what might precede and follow it.

With this show, Shahbazi insists that reclaiming our vision – our ability to see with more eyes and more senses, within and without – is a form of survival, noncompliance, and collective processing through action. EYES, COME BACK becomes a fugitive space of resistance where we are asked to question, to come together, to interact, and to collectively seek maps through loopholes, by means of holes in the sky, as Joy Harjo writes: 

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for
those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged
from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

[...] 

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

— Excerpt from: “A Map to the Next World” by Joy Harjo 

SETAREH SHAHBAZI  was born in Tehran – one year and one day before the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Her family moved to the south of Germany in the 1980s as political refugees. She studied Scenography and Media Arts at the State Academy for Art and Design in Karlsruhe and spent the following ten years living and working between Beirut, Tehran and Berlin, where she has been based since 2013. Her work draws inspiration from visual notes that surround her, from old family photographs to newspaper clippings, feeding into her conceptual installations, multi-coloured prints, and digitally manipulated photomontages. Through her artistic practice, Shahbazi offers reconstructed narratives, simultaneously provided by her personal and collected stories. Her works have been displayed in exhibitions in Iran, Lebanon, Germany, Italy, and France, among others.