Opening of 'Maryam Monalisa Gharavi: Yet Where the Danger Dwells'

KODA is pleased to present Yet Where the Danger Dwells, a solo survey exhibition with artist Maryam Monalisa Gharavi spanning highlights from a decade of work in film/video, performance, drawing, sculptural installation, and text. The exhibition title borrows the opening lines of German Romantic poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin’s Patmos: “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch” (“Yet where the danger dwells, grows / The saving grace also”). 

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Working within a Conceptualist ethos and proffering multidisciplinary means, Gharavi posits the limits of knowledge as the central quest and question of her practice. Featured works were often produced in “soft” non-hierarchical series–where a film/video becomes a drawing sequence which becomes an artist book. Gharavi’s practice has innovated within three elements of human knowledge systems—visibility, language, security—because their contradictions, mysteries, and betrayals have a capacity to make a double move. The visible, sayable, and securable each contain the possibility…