Masoumeh Mohtadi

Masoumeh Mohtadi is a conceptual artist whose practice revolves around three interrelated concerns: the distortion of language in our perception; the relationship between language and patriarchal ideologies, which shape our minds and behaviour through linguistic frameworks; and the distortion of perception in linguistic apprehension. These concerns call for a material of their own, and Mohtadi has made the “word” the primary material of her practice—a material that takes form through books, paper, stitching, weaving, and related materials. In Mohtadi’s work, the word is not merely a carrier of meaning; it becomes a visual and physical material in its own right, something to be both seen and read.

This gives rise to a fundamental question: if language itself is subject to the ideological and patriarchal conditions that shape our meaning and perception, how can an artist speak through that very language?Mohtadi’s response is to construct a personal language within these constraints—a language that emerges through disrupting the conventional order of language. Consequently, an important part of understanding her work lies in gradually coming to recognise the logic of this personal language.

Mohtadi’s work calls for a multi-layered reading. The word assumes a formal and aesthetic role on the one hand, becoming part of the work’s visual texture through weaving, cutting, fragmentation, and arrangement; on the other, it continues to carry semantic layers.

As a result, what may initially appear to be merely a visual pattern can, through closer attention, reveal itself as a word, a sentence, or another meaning. From this perspective, veiled speech becomes one of the defining characteristics of her practice. Meaning takes shape in the space between seeing and reading, and through the fragmentation and dispersal of words. Her semantic layers thus function both as a means of speaking and as a shield against explicit articulation: what cannot be said directly remains embedded in the form and arrangement of words, waiting to be discovered by the viewer.

Three works from the series The Sleep of Reason are presented as part of the “Continuum” initiative. In this series, Mohtadi places images of works by Francisco Goya against a background of Persian letters; arranged together, these letters form the Qur’anic verse “There is no compulsion in religion.” Yet the letters appear fragmented and dispersed, and the sentence becomes complete only when they are brought together. This rupture takes reading out of a fixed, linear mode and opens up the possibility of alternative readings before the phrase is fully assembled. The viewer consequently moves between seeing and reading: a surface initially perceived as a visual pattern or calligraphic structure gradually becomes language, while language returns to the realm of the image.

The juxtaposition of these letters with Goya’s images of violence and suffering also creates a distance between the explicit meaning of the words and the visual reality of the works—a distance through which the work questions the conditions under which language acquires meaning.

In these works, the word is neither simply something to be read nor merely an image to be seen; it is both material and meaning, something that simultaneously reveals and conceals. This suspension between legibility and illegibility, seeing and reading, and speaking and withholding constitutes one of the most significant dimensions of Mohtadi’s personal language.