Artists statement

Your Place is Empty is an expression used in Iran as a way of saying ‘you were missed’. The works in this show are like spaces left behind when someone or something is gone, temporarily or permanently. They are disjointed, fading memories of a long time ago. They have become unreliable fragments, manifesting like floor plans of a childhood home drawn from memory. But the lines are disjointed, no longer connecting enough to make any discernible maps. They are fading trails.

Artist Bio
Exploring notions of home and memory, Hootan Heydari (Born 1970 in Tehran) melds personal and political histories that often centre on the moment of 1979 when his family fled Iran following the Islamic revolution. Working predominately in sculpture and photography, his work distils echoes of the past into the now with richness and ache.

Biographically loaded objects with poetic potencies, such as family photographs and cassette tapes, are at times repetitively stacked and frozen in stillness in custom-made cabinets. Plaster is frequently used as a strong yet fragile material to both coat and cast, associated with building homes and healing broken bones. Farsi text often features – an Iranian refrain that breaks down linear time. Threading through Hootan’s practice is futility, compulsion and repetition: hallmarks of the act of making and the act of remembering.