Warm welcome to Mehregan Meysami’s degree show at Galleri Mejan, the Royal Institute of Art’s student gallery.
Opening hours:
Mån–fre 12.00–18.00
Lör–sön 12.00–17.00
Friday 10 December 17.00–21.00
The exhibition runs from 10–19 December.
Mehregan Meysami:
Among Pebbles and Diamonds
Sometimes when you leave a place, it’s like it’s there with you, all the time.
For me, “desert” is like that.
Now I live in a place that is surrounded by water…but I think about the desert more than ever. In the land of “heavenly waters”, desert is with me. All the time. But not just any desert. What is here with me is:[the desert] “Barahout”…
In my mother tongue Persian, in casual conversations the word “Barahout” conveys a negative meaning and stands for the wretched; a metaphor for a place that has the condition of extreme undesirability, it brings to mind the concept of an expanded bare-land; a desert devoid of life that logically no one would desire for.
It was only very recently that I found out that the “Barahout” that we use in Persian, originates from what, in fact, is a well; a sink-hole, located in the desert province of Hadhramaut in Yemen. The well of “Barahout” is called “well of hell” by the locals and is believed to be the prison of demons. The infamous“Barahout” has also been called “the worst well on earth”; as a place dedicated solely to infidels. The English equivalent for “Barahout” [in its meaning of well of hell], could be: abyss, which in late Middle English has been used in the sense of “infernal pit”: via late Latin from Greek abussos [bottomless], from a- “without” + bussos “depth”.
But how can we associate such dystopian notion to the desert? I ask myself.
The title of the show is borrowed from the poem: Among Pebbles and diamonds, written by Ehsan Tabari in 1977.