A New Dawn in the Studio: Paria Shahverdi’s Living Still Life
Walter Benjamin, gazing at Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, imagined the angel of history: its face
turned toward the wreckage of the past, wings caught in a storm that blows it helplessly into the
future. This storm, he wrote, is what we call progress. Ahmad Shamloo, in his magnificent poem,
Paria, sings of angels who hover between suns and stars, between laughter and lament,
guardians of vision who refract desire into multiplicity. To place Benjamin’s backwardblown
angel beside Shamloo’s radiant constellation is to glimpse history and poetry entwined: one
dragged through catastrophe, the other shimmering with plural voices, each revealing a different
temporality of being.
“Paria” is a word born of poetry, literally “plural angels” a name Shamloo created as if
summoning a small chorus of guardians into being. He offered this name to his friend’s newborn
daughter, Paria Shahverdi, as both a name and a promise. The name carries the sense of many
presences, many watchful forces, a constellation rather than a single star. Shahverdi’s installation
inhabits precisely this tension. Her woven threads are caught in the storm of perception, binding
viewers into a fabric where every gesture becomes both debris and dawn. Like Foucault’s
reading of Las Meninas, the work stages a drama of gazes, refracting vision through multiple
positions, folding the viewer into its shifting center. And, echoing MerleauPonty’s insistence that
“the body sees and is seen,” Shahverdi collapses subject and object—angel and angle—into a
lived field of relation. The angel of history, the angel of poetry, and the angel of perception
converge here, not as metaphors alone, but as presences woven into the very atmosphere of her
studio.
Created in the Long Tone Studio at Arts Letters & Numbers, the work resists categorization. It is
painting, drawing, weaving, sculpture, film, and performance all at once, but more deeply, it is a
reconstitution of the conditions of seeing. By stringing yarn between columns, Shahverdi
thickens the picture plane into a palpable surface, turning drawing into an environment. The threads
shimmer like a holographic membrane, refracting light and gaze into multiple dimensions. What
appears as line becomes surface; what appears as surface becomes space. The studio becomes a
still life, not a tableau of objects, but a relational atmospheric field where every chair, every
thread, every gesture participates in the act of vision. It is a still life that inhabits life, and the life
that inhabits the still life.
The chairs intensify this relationality. One stands in the center as the subject, another holds a pad of
paper, and a third is reserved for the artist, who draws the first chair into the surface of the paper
held by the second. This triangulation echoes Foucault’s insistence that representation is always
refracted through multiple positions. The chairs are angles of vision, but also angels of presence,
guardians of perception hovering between silence and revelation. They recall Shamloo’s angels,
plural and luminous, but also Benjamin’s angel, caught between wreckage and storm, unable to
turn away from history yet compelled into the future. Each chair becomes a station point in a
choreography of seeing, a hinge between presence and absence.
MerleauPonty’s Eye and Mind deepens this understanding. Painting, he writes, is not a detached
representation but a participation in the flesh of the world. Shahverdi’s threads embody this: they
are not marks on a canvas but gestures extended into space, vibrating with the body’s movement.
Her threehour wall drawing wild, exuberant, savage, unrestrained, is less an image than an event,
a burst of being that saturates the studio with energy. Each mark is a wingbeat in Benjamin’s
storm, both a trace of what has passed and a propulsion into what is yet to come. The drawing’s
immediacy is not chaos but immersion, a lived moment of vision that refuses to be tamed.
Henri Bergson’s notion of duration offers another lens. Time, for Bergson, is not a sequence of
instants but a continuous flow where each moment carries the memory of the last. Shahverdi’s
installation is precisely such a duration. The woven threads accumulate gestures; the chairs
accumulate gazes; the drawing accumulates energy; and the film of sunrise projected from the
ceiling crowns this temporal unfolding. The dawn is not a static image but a lived experience of
becoming, a temporal organism gathering memory even as it unfolds into the future. Benjamin’s
angel, blown forward yet facing backward, is mirrored here: the installation gathers fragments of
dawn, even as it opens new horizons.
Shahverdi’s work resonates deeply with Shamloo’s poetry, echoing the multiplicities of voice
and becoming. Each line is a mark, each mark a sun, each sun a star in a constellation of dawns;
each thread an angle of vision, an angel of presence. Together they gather into a heartbeat, a
living still life, a poem, a song, a quiet choreography of positions, proximities, and intensities.
The woven threads themselves sing Shamloo’s freedom: dissolving the wall, thickening the
picture plane into an openness where light and shadows weave catastrophe into possibility. From
this trembling surface, relation gathers, not as ornament, but as a lived insistence that nothing
stands alone. Every strand carries the memory of another hand, another rupture, another vow to
keep the world from narrowing.
In that density, the work refuses despair; it leans instead toward a future smuggled inside the
present, a quiet uprising of form against forgetting, of life against emptiness. Their holographic
shimmer reminds us that experience is never flat but layered, refracted, doubled,
multidimensional, a living field in which the still life inhabits life, and life, in turn, inhabits the
still life.
Through all their lines, layers, marks, light, and shadows, this work announces a new dawn, a
gate at the edge of a great lake, a threshold where ancient basement bookshelves become threads,
threads become shadow marks, marks become voices, voices become poems, poems become
spaces, spaces become life. A child is born, rising through the wreckage and storms, becoming
new angels, becoming پریا.
David Gersten | December 2025
Founding Director, Arts Letters and Numbers
arts letters & numbers