Afsaneh Modiramani

Time is the central concern in Afsaneh Modiramani’s work: an accelerated time that continually transforms everything and deprives us of the opportunity to pause and reflect. In this process, everything is exposed to the possibility of disappearance. In response to this acceleration, Modiramani creates a different temporality through the slow and repetitive process of weaving—a time in which one can pause, contemplate change, and preserve within the warp and weft of the work what might otherwise be lost to the passage of time.

Tehran, the city in which Afsaneh was born and has lived, is, more than anything else, the site of this temporal experience. In the midst of this acceleration, Tehran takes on a new form each day, while constant movement and change make transformation inseparable from rupture and forgetting. Afsaneh’s response to this condition is neither one of negation nor rejection, nor a form of resistance grounded in erasure. Instead, she pauses and weaves these contradictions into the work itself. Nature and construction, movement and stillness, past and present become so thoroughly intertwined in the warp and weft of her works that they can no longer be easily separated. Her resistance takes shape not as direct protest, but through the creation of an alternative rhythm.

Through weaving, she does not seek to stop acceleration; rather, she creates another time in the face of accelerated and erosive time—a time that is slow, repetitive, and contemplative. Every knot and every row repeats an action that cannot be hurried or simply passed over; the hand must remain present, moment by moment, for the work to take shape. It is within this necessary slowness and sustained presence that weaving transforms what acceleration and forgetting threaten to erase into image and memory. What disappears without pause in the city finds, within the textile, an opportunity to remain. Even where an image remains unfinished or a section of the weave is left empty, this absence becomes part of the narrative—a trace of something that has vanished with time and can no longer be represented. The work thus becomes not merely a description of the city, but an act in itself against its acceleration: a process that grants what is being lost the possibility of remaining.