Abel Hartooni
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The Price of a Thirst Trap
MORPHO Antwerp 2026
Part of ‘peer-a-theory’, exhibition by the participants of the ADMA Antwerp
The Price of a Thirst Trap is a painting diorama, along with a publication titled “M.Q’s motivation letters’. This diorama is an attempt to re-embody Muhammad Qasim Tabrizi’s 1635 painting ‘Youth Holding a Letter’
This self-portrait, cum-letter, cum-petition which was painted as a plea to the patronage of Qarachaghay khan,the governor of north east Iran in 1630. In it, the artist utilizes the image of the beardless youth, which was the ultimate object of desire of that time and space. A seduction perhaps.
I draw a parallel between this historical plea and the modern-day race for “motivation letters” in our current art ecosystem. In a hyper-financialized art world, where the artists, just like financial derivatives, have to gather all sorts of information, life experience, trauma etc., and reproduce them as art (value), this research deals with the fragile conditions of visibility for those artists (especially those minoritarian subjects) who have to constantly negotiate their identities and beliefs to participate in the same machinery of exclusion.
The diorama is composed of painted wooden pannels, a pair of wax casted hands holding a letter, and a landscape painting glued to the backdrop. The work tries to question how fluidity, fragmentation, and opacitiy can help us re-embody those historical narratives which are usually flattened within the dominant modes of visibility (both within the Western art historical canon, and also in the Persian art history). By choosing to remove the body from the composition and narrate it through a diorama-- as a displaying technology in the western museology which disciplines both the object, and the body of the visitor-- I tried to be reflective on my own position within the western artistic infrastructure.
The poetry publication accompanying the work are composed through a method of “Spreadsheet seance”, where phrases from three different sources were initially gathered, and then subjected to random numerical ordering in a spreadsheet, severing the signifier from the signified. To quote is to summon.
Just as value is detached from any corporeal meaning in financial world, poetry in a different way also abandons referentiality. Yet, as an excess of language, it remains a reflection of the affect. Through that automation, it activates the emotional body, and therefore aims at reactivates social solidarity.
The Price of a Thirst Trap
65 x 53 x 35 cm, Ply wood, MDF, Oil paint, Wax, Silk Thread, Yupo paper, and aluminum, 2026
Photo credit: Fabien Silvestre Suzor