Shima Taj Bakhsh: Soft Collapse

_Soft Collapse_ centers on Kaboutar ( کبوتر( the Persian word for pigeon, a shifting persona that moves between biographical research, history, and fiction. The project began with an anonymous gravestone bearing the name Kaboutar in a cemetery in my hometown. Over time, encounters with others who carried the same name led to research into the lives of a poet, a warrior, a burglar, and a political prisoner. Though separated by time and circumstance, their stories converge around survival, resilience, imagination, and the daily negotiation of oppressive social and political structures. The exhibition constructs an imagined history in which these biographical narratives intersect with historical images, drawing from ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian monumental reliefs, where scenes of everyday life, such as food preparation, were recorded alongside political and mythological narratives. The work brings personal histories and ordinary gestures into conversation with the visual language of monuments. Throughout the exhibition, the pigeon becomes a connective figure: historically a source of food, a companion, and a means of communication, while also carrying associations of migration, navigation, adaptation, and return. Kaboutar considers how stories persist through repetition, reconstruction, and transformation rather than as fixed or complete historical narratives. Bodies disappear, monuments deteriorate, and records are lost, altered, or fragmented, yet traces remain. Through the continual rearrangement of these remnants, biography and fiction become modes of speculative reconstruction, imagining what has been erased while carrying its traces forward in altered forms.