Abel Hartooni
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In Search of Hiding the Ghosts
MORPHO Antwerp 2026
Presented as part of ‘peer-a-theory’, a research exhibition by the 2025-6 prticipants of ADMA Antwerp
In Search of Hiding the Ghosts is a multidirectional research project that traces the role of opacity and fluidity to summoning those histories and perspectives that are flattened and overshadowed by the dominant regimes of visibility. Through expanded painting and writing I try to bridge between material and theoretical research, and find ways to interconnect them.
I usually pick and pluck fragments from the past and different theoretical frameworks, transforming them to something else, and letting them transform me in return. The process usually deals with constant disorientation/ reorientations. Most of my work in the past three years has been about bringing to present, the practices of painting which existed during the Safavid era Iran (1501-1736) along with their socio-economic and sexual context.
Innitially, I asked how can the figure of the ghost make (in)visible those histories, and knowledge which are often overshadowed or flattened by dominant/majoritarian ones? Moreover I was also curious to know more about the spectral presence of finance in relation to arts. What I learnt from the ghosts was that in method, they always stay in-between. Between living and the dead, pasts and futures, presences and absences, the no longer and the not yet. Famously quoted, for ghosts time is simply out of joint.
This research led up to two distinct projects:
-Tash’eers
-The Price of a Thirst Trap
You can read moe about the research HERE
Photo: Fabien Silvester Suzor