Missed Mist

The viewer completes the film

 Abbas Kiarostami

 

The new works by Iranian artist Ali Kaeini engage with the mechanics of human imagination under conditions in which parts of what is visible, and even thinkable, are displaced by censorship or self-censorship. In such circumstances, the mind is forced to complete what is missing, to reconstruct images so that a sense of wholeness can emerge. Absence thus becomes an active space: a site of projection that turns erasure into a dialogue between the artist and the viewer.

 

This body of work explores how censorship, absence, and imagination have shaped visual language and representations of intimacy in post-revolution Persian pop culture through non-masculine bodies. Drawing on Iranian calligraphy and working with dyed fabric, bleach, and collage, Kaeini creates ghost-like figures that appear through erasure rather than addition. The works reveal how censorship generated its own visual grammar, and how what is missing can remain deeply felt. Through painting and ink drawing, the artist revisits scenes and moments that were removed, altered, or never shown in post-revolution Iranian cinema, focusing on how intimacy and human connection were shaped by restriction.

 

Kaeini does not reference specific films or depict identifiable scenes. Instead, the works collectively produce a sense of pseudo-documentary ambiguity, central to the language of Iranian art-house cinema — where fiction and memory blur, and meaning emerges through suggestion rather than narration.

 

A central series of canvases appears as if veiled by a thin layer of mist, echoing the exhibition’s title. They evoke imagined sensual scenes from Iranian cinema — moments censored, never shown, or existing only in memory. Working through subtraction with bleach on dyed fabric, the artist allows spectral images to surface. The muted, near-monochrome palette recalls early cinema, where absence becomes a form of presence.

 

An important part of the project is a series of calligraphic ink drawings. The figures in these works draw on Iranian calligraphic traditions from periods when figurative imagery was prohibited by Islamic authorities. Calligraphers shaped sacred names and religious words in ways that discreetly formed human figures. For Kaeini, this historical reference also points toward the creation of a fictional language, something suspended between Farsi and Arabic calligraphy, images that appear readable yet ultimately withhold meaning from the viewer.

 

The visual form of these erotic calligraphic drawings also resonates with the aesthetics of modernism, particularly the work of Egon Schiele, whose practice shares affinities with calligraphy in its emphasis on line as an expressive force. In both traditions, broken gestures and interrupted contours convey tension and desire, where the line itself carries emotional charge.

 

Another key motif in the project is collage. Abstract and repeated forms derived from Persian museum objects, symbols, and ornaments are digitally processed, laser-cut, and collaged onto canvas. These layered compositions act as metaphors for the displaced body, spaces in which erased figures from censored cinema acquire a renewed presence. Kaeini also draws on the poetry of Omar Khayyam, where vessels function as metaphors for human existence- objects now dispersed across museums worldwide. 

 

The fluidity of fabric intensifies the sense of spectral instability, while recurring motifs, swans, flowers, traditional ornament, root the work in everyday Iranian visual culture, bridging domestic life and art, imagination and cultural memory.