Navid Azimi Sajadi at Studio la Linea Verticale
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| Navid Azimi Sajadi, “Untitled”, 2025, carpet, hand-woven wool tapestry with cotton base, 89×151 cm (179 with fringes). Courtesy Studio la Linea Verticale and Juliet Art Magazine. |
by Emanuela Zanon, Juliet Art Magazine
Mater Ex Mater – Act I, solo exhibition by Navid Azimi Sajadi (Tehran, 1982) currently on in Bologna at Studio la Linea Verticale, is the first public configuration of a project that was meant to be more expansive and which now, in its lacunae, concretely shows the destructive consequences of every war. Geopolitical pressure made it impossible to complete the original plan, and what the public encounters is what the artist managed to bring out of Iran before the conflict closed every passage. Carpets produced under his direct supervision in the Mozafariyeh district (a historic area within the bazaar of Tabriz, renowned since the twelfth century for the trade and production of high-quality Persian carpets, now a UNESCO site), ceramics belonging to previous cycles, drawings on paper, preparatory cartoons. It is an Act I that bears its own incompleteness inscribed in the title as a structural condition, the hallmark of a cultural resistance exercised precisely in the act of bringing to safety fragments of a visual universe threatened by the violent irruption of history.
But it would be reductive to read Mater Ex Mater solely through the lens of biographical and political urgency. The project has its roots in a question that Navid Azimi Sajadi has been asking himself for years with growing insistence: what does it mean to be a contemporary Iranian artist? It is not a matter of an identity belonging to be defended nor of a folklore to be preserved, but of the ethical and existential need to understand where one’s gaze comes from, what the deep structures (symbolic, formal, philosophical) are that shape it before critical consciousness and design intention set themselves in motion.
The answer Sajadi has found is a method: going back through the history of Persian, Islamic, Byzantine and Mediterranean art to discover that even cultures perceived as distant or ranged on opposing geopolitical fronts share, at deep strata, the same archetypes. That the cypress of Persian miniature and that of Italian painting are the same tree. That barbed wire can become an indecipherable but eloquent writing. That the scorpion of Iranian amulets and that of Mesopotamian iconography go back to the same recipe, which is pharmacological before it is symbolic, found in a burned city nine thousand years ago. That the five-pointed star of the Temple of Ishtar and the one in the archaeology books his father showed him as a child are the same sign, and that this sign is omnipresent in mosques, as well as in national flags, above all the American one.
This short circuit between distant and near, between ancient and contemporary, between East and West, is the raw material with which Navid Azimi Sajadi nourishes his imagination. The carpets produced in Tabriz, displayed in the exhibition as tapestries hung on the walls and immediately recognizable at first glance as something unclassifiable, are the most recent and most complete manifestation of this process. On ivory grounds traversed by embroidered designs in black and turquoise thread, hybrid figures and dense symbologies arrange themselves with the logic of a generative writing: open hands crossing over a body-knot, an armed leg surmounted by a star-ziggurat, a boat endowed with feet walking on the Nile, the river in which Moses was abandoned, rendered as a graphic composition of waves drawn from an illuminated Bible; the sarveragon, the fluid cypress that walks on the roots of the Persian poetic tradition. Each composition is born from a preparatory drawing and from a combination of polysemantic words. The artist himself underlines the literary origin of his creative process, in which the image takes shape in the mind as a mix of objects that fuse their respective symbologies into a new visual discourse, similar to a hieroglyph or a poem. The technique of weaving, learned from the masters of the Tabriz bazaar and adapted through a millimeter-grid preparatory card that transforms the drawing into a succession of points, adds the dimension of ritual time: each carpet is an act of translation lasting months and involving different hands in a chain of artisanal transmission that itself becomes part of the meaning.
Alongside the carpets, an installation of circular ceramics connected by rusted chains, created in 2020 during a residency at the Castello della Zisa in Palermo, creates on the wall a suspended constellation that evokes at once a necklace of ex-votos and an underwater archaeological find. On each disc, a turquoise drip reproduces the exact blue shade that distinguishes a body of Iranian ceramic production offcuts dating from the eleventh century, pieces that went wrong, which Sajadi studied in museums and then replicated as a deliberate error. This informal coloristic element, in whose outline we can glimpse the cypress with its wind-blown crown, the wings of the Seraph or the recurring flame found elsewhere, coexists with black figurations of marked contours that combine Persian seals, Byzantine iconography, liturgical gestures, and occult bestiaries in an allegorical proliferation that does not ask to be decoded but to be recognized by the gaze and the unconscious.
As the title suggests, Mater is here both the mother and the matter (the womb that generates and retains, the sacred space and the place of the fall) in the dualistic tension that runs through the entire project and finds its most explicit formulation in Cautes and Cautopates, the two torch-bearers (symbolizing the beginning and the end of the cycle of the sun and of life) that flank the god Mithras in the tauroctony. Navid Azimi Sajadi’s is a system of thought in permanent construction, founded on a visual archive that feeds itself and transforms, opening to continuous heretical osmoses. His creative process, eclectic in techniques and materials but firmly unitary in inspiration, assimilates the logic with which in antiquity craftsmen overwrote the same symbologies onto architectures, ceramics and carpets, understood as equal components of a harmonious and interconnected world, without hierarchical distinction between art and object of use. Above all in this sense, Mater Ex Mater – Act I is an artistic and simultaneously political act of universal scope, in its alignment against the simplification of cultural identities and against the ideological polarization between the civilizations of the Mediterranean created by history and geopolitics, which Sajadi’s works, with patient tenacity, continue to dismantle.
Info: Navid Azimi Sajadi. Mater Ex Mater – Act I: 30/04/2026 – 4/06/2026, Studio la Linea Verticale via dell’Oro 4b, Bologna
See images here
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