'Queer is, after all, a spatial term, which then gets translated into a sexual term, a term for a twisted
sexuality that does not follow a “straight line”… The spatiality of this term is not incidental.'
Sara Ahmed, 2006. Queer Phenomenology, 67.
In rūḥ al-rūḥ - jan-e janān, Ayman Kaake is twisting. His body, projected onto sheets of sheer chiffon, rotates in a gentle shuffle, the sway of a belly-dance punctuating his movements. Periodically he lifts a semi-transparent red sheet, which falls over his face, then it is hoisted over his shoulder and draped again, revealing and obscuring his visage. Kaake’s closed eyes indicate focus, but his face is serene with the pleasure of his movement. This push and pull, vacillating revelation and obscuring, is a crucial theme across the four works of this exhibition – and curator Tahmina Maskinyar has grouped them together with a calculated sensitivity.
Elyas Alavi, Ayman Kaake, Ali Tahayori, and Kia Zand each have a single work in the show which occupies the darkened exhibition room at West Space. While steeped in the politics of identity, the works are not immediately forthcoming with their conceptual intentions — and that’s the point. There is no straight line towards interpretation, rather, they radiate quiet potentiality. They invite an audience to partake, even briefly, in a secret, whispered conversation with one another. The proximity of the works is tight and a camaraderie between artists is palpable. While speaking to each other in their own distinct ways, each work offers a kind of twist.
I borrow the notion of the twist from Sara Ahmed. Her forays into queer phenomenologies yield concepts that are concerned with 'disoriented' directions and off-kilter, 'slanted' encounters. She notes ‘queer’’s Indo-European etymology: a word for ‘twist’. To twist is to create shape, to dance, to glimpse behind, to see left and right. Twisting enables observation of the self in relation to the parallel; twisting enables lines to overlap. Twisting breaks a 'straight' line. Twisting enables, and indeed exemplifies, disorientation. In doing so, the exhibition offers glimpses into complex, diasporic, queer lives — where disorientations of sexuality and geography overlap to produce a holistic narrative. Imperatively, they are the queer lives of West and Central Asia origins (or, as a full term, South West Asia and North Africa, referred to with the abbreviation SWANA), lives that are deeply affected by the weight of cultural legacies, social roles, traditions and expectations. Queerness interrupts, or disorients these cultural traditions which often results in genuine violence, both historically and contemporaneously. But between friends and lovers, queerness offers a chance to bare the soul.
In his essay for West Space’s Offsite online publication, José Da Silva notes that 'the exhibition begins within [an] atmosphere of violence,' and that each work is a means of protection, in varying states of literalness. The exhibition eschews the usual trappings of many contemporary queer cultural productions, where bulletproof pride and radical optimism can at times feel like a grin stapled to a willing but exhausted face. Rather, it acknowledges the realities of cloaking one’s queerness — homosexuality in particular — in the wake of complex cultural inheritances. This being acknowledged, despite the cloaking, no artist expresses shame. They find kinship in their crafted disorientations, and together render criss-crossing paths forward into lives rich with companionship and private reverie.
Zand’s Only Birds Could See (2025) is described in the exhibition text as an 'anti-monument; ' its deconstructed form and inverted core lend immediate credence to this description. The structure can almost feel out of place at first, so seemingly devoid of iconography and coy with its relationships to the adjacent works. But of course, this withholding is the point. The slabs of marble, with both broken and refined, flat edges exposed, stack in such a way as to leave gaps between each placement, but not so much as to immediately reveal an interior space. Should one crouch down to peer through the gaps between layers, the marble’s surface is ghostly, with shadow and light peeking through in equal measures. It was precisely as I was doing this myself that a bright, metallic sound rang out from the hexagonally voided interior of the structure. Three motorised metal rods (not immediately visible at first glance) move in an uneven rhythmic rotation from within the empty space of the sculpture, and occasionally plink like muted bells when colliding with the marble fragments. A presence had suddenly animated the structure, and then retreated unseen. Whirling, they are like highly abstracted shadows of Kaake’s aforementioned solo dervish, one of many inter-textual dialogues that reach between works in the exhibition.
The internal mechanical whirring, complimented by the jagged but cylindrical formation of the sculpture, gives form to Zand’s own personal twisting. The cyclonic curtain of stone that resists the surveillance of the outside, the ascension of that which is discarded, and carving an ever-reforming, bending pathway on the inside. Zand’s past sculptures have been more willing to show his hand — some untitled works from the last twelve months show his careful carving into marble tablets of choice. Only Birds Could See takes his practice further to the edge between sculpture and found object, as his material interventions become more obscured. In doing so, his statement on the visibility of his presence as an artist, as a queer Iranian man, is rendered in its rawest form yet.
While Zand has stacked marble, Alavi has constructed a meticulous wall of bricks for his work دَیوار Divāl (2025). The sheer effort of the labour in the construction of such materially dense work acts as an affective force of its own, immediately evident and striking as a spatial intervention. One can almost feel a light sweat forming with the realisation. Compounding this is the mirroring of corporeal labour and the shouldered psychic burdens of homophobic violence. This shared literal and psychic heaviness between the two artists’ works is yet another shared dialogue within the show — a confiding whisper, a hand on another's shoulder. There is a charming incongruousness to دَیوار Divāl, as if it had suddenly fallen through dimensions from an Iranian kučeh alley, so materially raw it is against the modest wooden floors and white walls of West Space. Inscriptions in powdery turquoise sporadically melt forth from the weathered red bricks, words that include names of queer friends close to the artist. A patina of salt, sitting like an evening’s sleet, adorns the topmost bricks. Da Silva recounts in his essay Alavi's description of this salt as 'tears, purification, and the taste of memory that never leaves.'[1] Mnemonic and talismanic, the façade of this work alone is an effectively restrained monument.
This is not all. Walking behind the work reveals the verso, a shift to modulating layers of bricks, creating nooks and corners and nesting spots. These are adorned with a variety of objects. Many are small black and white photographs of friends side by side or hand in hand, with faces obscured in a manner not unlike that of fellow exhibitor, Tahayori (his works Sisterhood (2021) and Geometry of Belonging series (2023) come to mind). Alavi’s neon-based practice is present here too, including a small blue word in Farsi: یاد yād. The act of remembrance, like travelling through time. It thrums with a nocturnal pulse. A pomegranate, a beaded mirror, a folded letter, a small clay visage like a mask — these treasured objects are concealed and tucked away from the violence on the other side. In the revealing of an otherwise hidden, porous side, what becomes clear is that a wall is not always a border, but a nest for solidarity in overlapping material accord. Further, aniconism is turned on its head: rather than an avoidance of creating idols, the altered representations of figures and enshrining of objects is a gesture of protection, an extension of an act of love. Expectations meet a twist, a familiar face peaks out from behind a wall, and a plot line is upended.
Tahayori’s work leaves the figuration to Alavi and Kaake. Queers Were Here Before They Arrived (2025), continues Tahayori’s utterly stunning Āine-kāri Iranian mirror-making works. The defiant statement of the title rebukes former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2007 proclamation: 'In Iran, we don't have homosexuals. In Iran we don't have this phenomenon.'[2] This repressive state propaganda haunts the works within the exhibition, needling at their collective fortitude. Like his fellows, however, Tahayori’s resolve and execution is as robust and labour intensive as it is tender. I catch a dispersed image of myself in the many mirror fragments of the piece, and feel an unexpected, and profoundly moving, sense of embrace. The title of the work is embedded within the cascade of hand-cut mirrors, and shimmers in and out of view depending on your point of focus. Appearance and divergence. We are here. Beyond time. Directed lighting from above collides and bends with the mirror fragments with astounding effect, creating a spatial moment transportive enough to briefly convince me that perhaps José Esteban Muñoz was right about the potential of queer utopianism. Is my jaded shell beginning to crack? It feels glib to simply say, 'This is my favourite work in the show,' but with how effortlessly it punctured my irrepressible cynicism, I have to give Tahayori his dues for a twist of fate.
This said, I must admit that I did wish for a curtain or similar materially relevant prop to combat the light that leaks from the space’s plywood window coverings. Doing so would give profound focus to carefully selected and tempered light sources in an otherwise twilit hermitage. Controlled darkness is a feature excellently honed in sister-exhibition Five Acts of Love curated by Nur Shkembi for the generously resourced Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). The shadow of Five Acts… looms over rūḥ al-rūḥ - jan-e janān. While there are moments where I wish Maskinyar’s exhibition could be afforded a similar, sprawling space to breathe, I do ultimately appreciate the concentrated intimacy of the West Space gallery: a circle of close friends, rather than an expansive moment of Jum’ah.
In the middle of it all, Kaake dances in Testing the Water (2025). His abaya garment is inscribed with audience sourced personal sacrifices, made to meet societal expectations. Kaake’s voice whispers from above and a deliberate obscuring compels one to intimately lean forwards. The movements of his performance oscillate between the masculine and the feminine, blurring their distinctions. His body, projected on the layers of fabric, gradually fades as the light is caught in the chiffon. It's as if his essence is dispersing, journeying outwards into veiled realms of the soul. Maskinyar translates the exhibition title as 'soul of my soul' in both Arabic (rūḥ al-rūḥ) and Farsi (jan-e janān). She emphasises that this translation struggles to convey the depth of meaning within the phrases. More than just a term of affection, it is an acknowledgement of love extending beyond time, distance, and dimension. Kaake’s form acts as something of an ambassador to the spirit of these works, gesturing to the unseen and gently lifting the veils of our expectant gazes. Dually, it is Kaake coming into focus, allowing himself to be seen, vulnerable but authentic.
What lies between these oscillating states of opacity is both muscular and tender, resilient with solidarity and generous with affection. No straight lines, only twisting paths beyond borders.
[1] José Da Silva, ‘rūḥ al-rūḥ—jan-e janān,’ Offsite, 15 November 2025, https://westspace.org.au/offsite/work/ruh-al-ruh-jan-e-janan (accessed 19 November 2025).
[2] David Shariatmadari, ‘No gay people in Iran, Mr President? News to me …,’ The Guardian, 27 September 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/26/iran.features11 (accessed 19 November 2025).