grunt gallery presents Crossed, an exhibition by artist Ahmad Tabrizi and curated by Makiko Hara. This multi-media exhibition creates a sense of portraiture compiled of Farsi script, piles of dressmaking pins, and glimpses of the artist himself – both visually and through audio.

“This installation [addresses] intellectual claustrophobia through language as a weapon of attack and defense; what is lost in the communication becomes loud sounds, weaponized sounds, sounds through the presence of pins. Pins are a universal symbol of pain, like a loud “ouch,” but silent at the same time. It is also a portrait, but reduced to just eyes and language. The self-portrait of pinheads, though there is no specific self, is perhaps a very oddball portrait – oddballs of displacement and misplacement and the “door” separating Us and Them. The Persian language written on the “door” is used as decoration or beauty (surface). The English is used as tag or brandification – one as “unknown,” one as insult/poetry or slogan of the collective experiences of refugees, the exiled, marginalized or what is “normally” perceived as “the Others.”