“Flooring Gods presents around 40 recent works of the anonymous Tehran based stencil artist and is to date his most ambitious solo show. Nafir aims to reintroduce the woman in the Iranian public space. By stencilling unveiled faces of Iranian women on centuries-old carpets and pasting them in the street, he aims to support the Iranian youth, disillusioned and hopeful, and to confront the taboos of a regime whose rigorist Islam forbids such practice as iconography but also aims to rejuvenate a pre-Islamic past and reconnect with Persia’s old history.

The choice of this woven surface to express his ideas is very much linked to his personal history and a deep love for his country and regional traditions (as Nafir puts it, “the history of Iran is not written, it is woven”), albeit used in an iconoclastic way.

The exhibition also introduces works on handmade ceramics, as well as paintings on traditional chiselled dishes, and for the first time a series of handicraft spray cans. For this specific series, Nafir reverses his artistic process: instead of spray
painting carpets, he imagined upcycling his used spray cans at the hands of master craftsmen in the Teheran bazaar who in turn could imprint their ancestral knowledge onto the aerosol vessel (miniature paintings, woodcarving etc…), a sort of collaboration and bond between generation.

An additional installation welcomed the guests at the entrance of the gallery, showcasing the subject of Nafir’s limited edition fine art print titled “Behind the sun”.”