Hootan Heydari, Tamam Shod/Tamam Nashod, 2023. Steel, glass, silver, digital image on archival paper 24 karat gold leaf, 30 x 21 x 10cm. Courtesy: the artist and FUTURES, Melbourne.

FUTURES presents a solo exhibition by Hootan Heydari, his first presentation with the gallery.

For The Past is Present Heydari has created a suite of potent wall-mounted vitrines containing a repetition of objects that evoke personal and political pasts, orchestrated through a compulsive process of making. Each custom glass-fronted steel cabinet functions as one-part news headline and one-part journal entry. Inside lie saved or inherited artifacts and images creating minimal Wunderkammers that are time capsules of lived experience, imbued with the traces of their own history.

Looking back to the Islamic Revolution of 1979 which was the year Heydari and his family consequently fled lran, this body of work layers multiple experiences of displacement with the echoes that reverberate into the now; the past and present fold into these cinematic tomes.

Each object is obsessively worked. Pistachios are laboriously cast, family photos dipped in plaster, glass is gilded with gold, and Farsi text is delicately engraved. Heydari’s gestures are steeped in biography and seen through a lens of history, taking up obfuscation as a revealing strategy.

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