About Artwork State of emergency

Since 2012, amusement parks have been the main subject of Solmaz Heshmati’s work. As war was raging during her childhood, haunting images of how such a lively place, dedicated to happiness and rejoicing, could be abandoned and left in total silence burned into her memory. An amusement park without the people and their livelihood is just a barren land with some manmade rides and equipment that are now tragically rotting away. The title of this collection is “State of emergency”, a term that, in the political theory of Karl Schmitt, corresponds to a state in which the ruling power can suspend laws and rules in the name of establishing public order and welfare. This collection tries to capture and face this artificial world of manmade rides and portray a situation in which all the common and familiar rules of human life are suspended. Yet, it tries to defamiliarize us with what is regarded as usual so that the truth of the situation in which we live would be presented. In the process of creating these artworks, layers of very thin papers were piled up to form these textures which depict light and darkness before defining any elements and guide me to create shapes and forms.