Upon first encountering these veils, one may be reminded of the book of The Little Prince with the image of the elephant in the python. Here, under colorful tents, the visual aesthetics and iconic brand identities of cars are made to disappear. They are shrunk to the minimum and hidden by a leveling camouflage.
These brightly colored tents made of bed sheets, duvets and cut-out advertising banners are full of figures and floral designs, with amazing details and sometimes scraps of sentences on them. Some are professionally crafted, others appear to have been sewn together by amateurs with conscious or unconscious layouts.
These strange installations only become fully understandable through knowledge of the cultural soil on which they are exhibited in urban space: it is the metropolis of Tehran. The work is the result of several months of research in this noisy city populated by countless cars. In the center of Tehran with its old buildings and in the poorer, southern part of Tehran, one’s own cars usually cannot be protected in underground garages from the rigors of the forces of nature and access by unau- thorized persons. So only the public space remains as the location of the stationary means of transport.
With these wrappers having completely digested their inner content, rendering the branded merchandise impossible to read, new objects are created, with a new kind of visual appeal. And this in connection with the return to traditional craftsmanship. A significant effort for families, who will also enlist the help of grandmothers to sew a 40-piece bedspread to keep their little cars safe!
