19.6 - 1.8.2026
The Quiet Storm presents a new body of work by Iranian artist Neda Zarfsaz centered on the fragile and transforming landscape of Lake Urmia in northwestern Iran. Expanding upon her earlier Chichast series, Zarfsaz revisits the lake as both a real ecological site and a symbolic terrain shaped by memory, disappearance, ritual, and endurance.
Named after the ancient title of Lake Urmia meaning “glittering,” Chichast emerged from the artist’s long engagement with the lake’s environmental collapse caused by drought, ecological mismanagement, and human neglect. Through video, photography, and painting, the exhibition brings together scenes of the lake before and after its devastation, tracing the transformation of a once-vast body of water into a fragile salt landscape marked by absence and erosion.
At the center of the exhibition are images and video works depicting the artist carrying and emptying vivid blue buckets across the white salt terrain, gestures suspended between care, futility, ritual, and resistance. Rather than functioning as direct ecological documentation, the works move toward a poetic and psychological space where repeated actions persist despite their apparent impossibility.
The immense landscape evokes a surreal and almost timeless emptiness, while the saturated blue of the buckets recalls associations with infinity, immateriality, and the void. Within these stark environments, Zarfsaz’s actions resemble solitary rituals performed against overwhelming silence, attempts to negotiate the limits of human agency in the face of environmental collapse. The works resonate with the famous lines by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire: “J’ai fait les gestes blancs parmi les solitudes” (“I have made empty gestures among the solitudes”).
Landscape photographs enclosed within glass structures partially filled with salt further extend the exhibition’s meditation on time, preservation, and disappearance. Resembling hourglasses or fragile archives, these works transform salt into both material residue and a measure of loss.
Throughout The Quiet Storm, Zarfsaz approaches ecological collapse not through spectacle, but through repetition, bodily effort, and quiet persistence. The exhibition reflects on the fragile space between hopelessness and responsibility, asking what it means to continue acting even when restoration itself remains uncertain.
A Note from the artist Neda Zarfsaz
"For many years, I have watched Lake Urmia, a body of water in my home country that is slowly receding into a desert of salt. It is a landscape defined by what is no longer there. Today, I find myself mirroring that landscape. My physical presence has evaporated from this room, blocked by the same invisible 'human systems' that I map in my work: visa borders, political frictions, and the weight of geography. But like the salt that remains on Urmia’s shores long after the water is gone, my work remains here as a residue of my intent. In my absence, the math of the system becomes visible. The 'gap' between Iran and Denmark is not just a distance on a map; it is a lived experience of resistance. I invite you to view these pieces not as static objects, but as the crystals left behind by a receding tide. I am not here, yet I am everywhere in the lines, the light, and the salt of this vision."
