Inherited archives and Persian poetry inform Golnar Adili’s artistic practice that deals with the impact of exile, separation, and survival on her own family following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Taken from her project, The Jasmine Scented Ones, Bestizand (They Quarrel) culls verbs from Hafez’s poem of the same name to draw out the latent tensions between verbs that are linguistically similar but also point to oppositional meanings. While Adili’s project is a thoughtful meditation on the affective dimensions of wordplay, the inclusion of her work in Ornamenting Relation intends to highlight a further tension between textuality and ornamentation. Here, the writing and the artist’s subsequent abstractions is not to make its message transparent, but to build on the opacity of the ornament.

This work is included in Ornamenting Relation, curated by Noor Bhangu, which features artists Hamra Abbas, Golnar Adili, Azadeh Elmizadeh, and Ayesha Singh. Through the individual lightboxes, the artists present their encounters with the ornamental canon of Islamic visual culture to reveal the continuities and discontinuities of the field in relation to contemporary art and political discourses.

Taking inspiration from traditional aspects of Islamic art, outlined by Laura Marks, as “almost always avoid[ing] depicting anything with a face, anything with a body, and even sometimes anything with an outline,” Ornamenting Relation seeks to understand the transgressive and relational potentialities of abstract aesthetics in mediating dialogue across diverse cultures.