- Title
- The Untitled Tomb
- Date Made
- 2012
- Medium
- Iron
- Dimensions
- a) Top: 26 1/2 × 24 × 2 1/2 in. (67.31 × 60.96 × 6.35 cm)
b) Bottom: 27 × 23 3/4 × 2 1/2 in. (68.58 × 60.33 × 6.35 cm)
a-b) Overall: 53 1/8 × 23 13/16 × 2 1/2 in. (135 × 60.5 × 6.35 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2014.27a-b
- Collecting Area
- Art of the Middle East: Contemporary
- Curatorial Notes
The key to this piece is revealed through its Persian text. Rendered in a font and format often used in a
traditional newspaper death notice, it commemorates a political dissident who was denied an actual
tombstone. The work was intended to function as a stencil, its Kafkaesque text, when activated by
charcoal dust, temporarily acknowledges one man’s sacrifice. The epitaph reads: "Here Mim Kaf Alif
[literally, his initials, M. K. A.] does not rest. He is dead. Layer beneath layer dead. Depth beyond depth.
Each time deeper. Each death deeper. Stone upon stone. Each stone deeper. Each stone a death. Mim
Kaf Mim Alif has no stone. Has never had. No trace of it (also to be understood as: so be it). Never in all
deaths. December came and Mim Kaf Mim Alif was no longer [there]. Is not."
Based in Tehran, Barbad Golshiri belongs to a new generation of artists whose work responds directly to
the constraints imposed by the politics and ideology of the Iranian government. The Untitled Tomb was a
focal point of Golshiri’s second one-man show in New York, at Thomas Erben Gallery in 2013, presented
as a kind of sculptural cemetery memorializing martyrs to Iran’s ruling regime.
