Maryam Monalisa Gharavi: Yet Where the Danger Dwells

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, “J (Judy),” Apparent Horizon 2, 2016. Graph paper, India ink, graphite, acrylic, text 

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July 19-August 24, 2025
Opening: July 19, 2025 at 3-5pm
Movement performance intervals at opening: 3:15, 3:45, 4:30, and 4:45pm

KODA House, Building #407B, Colonels Row, Governors Island, New York 

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 of their opposite: the non-visible, the unsayable, and the de-secured paradoxically impact perceptions of reality. Rather than seek to resolve such countering moves, she has written that the “highest task of the artist is to train her attention and efforts on the tensions they offer.”

Hölderlin’s 1803 hymn lays bare the clearest expression of this tension between risk and rescue, which occupy the same space in a deeply productive paradox and suggest the co-existence of distance and proximity, the unseen and the seen, and the beleaguered and redeemed. The “live film” is a practical and aesthetic entryway that Gharavi has developed over the last decade, proposing a space of activation and vitalization between the supposedly fixed reality of moving image and unfixed reality of live performance.  

 

One such live film, Contain Contain (filmed in 2015 in Ramallah)  will be activated by movement performances at 3:15 PM, 3:45 PM, 4:15 PM, & 4:30 PM during the exhibition opening by Palestinian dancer and performer Mohammed Smahneh (aka Barges) from Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre.

 

The opening will also feature the debut of éditions océan, Gharavi’s artist-run t-shirt publishing agency. Limited editions of t-shirts designed by Gharavi and Amsterdam/Beirut-based graphic designer Farah Fayyad will be available for purchase. 

 

Artist Bio
 

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist and poet whose work explores the asymptotic limits of knowledge. Exhibitions and performances include Pioneer Works, Sonic Acts, Nottingham Contemporary, Serpentine Cinema, Paço das Artes, Recess, ZKM Karlsruhe, among others. Book publications include The Distancing Effect, Secret Catalan Poem, Alphabet of an Unknown City,  the co-authored books Dictionary of Night and Oil News 1989-2020; and a translation of Waly Salomão’s Algaravias: Echo Chamber, nominated for a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Her book Bio is the first to be written on a social media platform while bypassing “big tech” data storage sites. She is the founder of Oil Research Group (ORG), a one-woman collective investigating oil, data, and extractive economies; in 2023, ORG was awarded an Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Art Grant. She completed a Ph.D. at Harvard University, an M.F.A. at Bard College, held a postdoctoral Fulbright at Birzeit University, served as visiting professor and guest studio critic at a dozen institutions, and is currently a faculty member at School for Visual Arts . She is a prompt engineer in the field of generative AI. Her translation of  Waly Salomão’s Border Fare is forthcoming from World Poetry Books.