Exhibition · Aabee Bleue Project · Los Angeles
Orkideh Torabi, Ali Zakeri, Parham Peyvandi, and Shima Faridani Curated by Nirvana Parvizimotlagh June 6 - July 11, 2026 Before books, there was the voice. Before the voice, there was the image held up in firelight, and someone standing before it, deciding where to look. The Naqqāl, the Iranian oral storyteller, did not preserve stories by fixing them. Stories stayed alive because they changed, reshaped by each telling, each room, each particular silence in the audience. From this came the Pardeh-khān: a figure who stood before a painted canvas and moved the viewer's attention like water, deciding what to linger on, what to let go, how one wound connected to another. The image was never complete without that body standing beside it, narrating. This is how I understand the act of curating. Not as the arrangement of finished meanings, but as a form of standing-beside. The works came to me first as images, encountered through the galleries representing the artists, through the slow accumulation of looking, and only later through research and language. The path did not pass through direct conversation with their makers. I came to them sideways, through the silence that exists between a work and its representation. Roland Barthes wrote that the death of the author is the birth of the reader, but perhaps what he meant is softer than it sounds. It is not that the artist disappears. It is that the work, once released into the world, becomes capable of meaning more than any single intention can hold. We live now in a moment when images move faster than understanding. Stories are lifted from their sources, repeated through different mouths, transformed by the platforms that carry them. In this condition, choosing how to tell a story, choosing what to place next to what, is not a neutral act. The question of narration has become a question of ethics. The exhibition unfolds across two rooms. Two pardehs. Each space is its own painted canvas. Each constructs its own world…