Haleh Redjaian uses thread to draw in space, constructing exquisite site-specific installations that often reference architecture. However, her interest in our responses to such articulations of space extends beyond the purely phenomenological to include affect. Redjaian creates a delicate, minimal installation that captures the characteristic torqued plane of Tehran’s iconic Azadi Tower, a fond and familiar landmark from the artist’s childhood trips to visit her grandmother. The piece investigates the way memories can accrue around a monumental structure and the way architecture can evoke a powerful emotional response, its transparency emphasizing the elusive nature of both memory and emotion.

Her work resituates these interests into a more intimate, domestic register. Her ambitious installation consists of three freestanding rectangular metal frames filled in with fields of vertically stretched threads. Recasting the wall as a see-through screen or permeable membrane rather than as a solid barrier, the installation gestures towards division, scrambling spatial distinctions between inside and outside or here and there. Playing with notions of transparency and opacity, of access and seclusion, it attempts to create an open shelter, an enclosure for daydreams that does not withdraw completely from the world.