Softer than the Wall

Statement:

Circuit announces “Softer than the Wall,” a group exhibition curated by Mamali Shafahi, at +2 Deh-Vanak. 

The exhibition opens on September 4th and will remain on view until September 25th, 2026.

This exhibition begins with the idea of resistance as an everyday, quiet, and continuous practice: a resistance that does not necessarily announce itself through a loud voice, explicit political language, or overt action. 

In conditions where simply living can become a form of pressure, restriction, and erosion, continuing, making, remembering, imagining, and preserving a personal language can themselves become forms of persistence. 

Rather than focusing on artists who adopt an explicitly activist position, the exhibition turns toward practices that respond to difficult social realities through indirect, poetic, and at times nearly invisible gestures. ///

In the works of Faaker, Bijan Nemati, Fereydoun Ave, Mehran Mohajer, Mehdi Hosseini, Parvaneh Etemadi, Hoda Kashiha, and the other participating artists, resistance appears not necessarily as the subject of the work, but as a quality embedded in ways of seeing, living, and making. 

Within the exhibition, Faaker extends a visual language usually formed in the street directly onto the gallery walls. 

This intervention functions not simply as an autonomous work, but as a shared ground and an additional layer through which the other works are encountered; as though a fragment of the outside world, with its vulnerability, transience, and memory, has entered the gallery. 

The exhibition is therefore less concerned with resistance as a heroic gesture than with endurance: the small, personal, and understated ways of preserving meaning under conditions that continually threaten it. 

What remains may not be a shout, but a trace: an image, a memory, a small gesture on the surface of a wall. 

Something fragile, yet persistent; something that can, at times, prove more enduring than the wall itself.