Mahan Abasian & Pardis Hesami

12,497 Knots

Embroidery directly on photographic print

Tehran, 2013-2026

This series begins with a simple disruption: something is sewn onto the surface of an image, so that the eye can no longer pass through it in its usual way.

Thread here is not decoration — it is intervention. The stitches are a means of touching what has remained beneath the surface.

The distance between the shutter and the needle is sometimes years.

This gap is not accidental; time itself is part of the work.

A knot is a pause: a small pressure on our visual habits — not to break them, but to make them visible.

12,497 knots.

One city, Tehran — still unseen.

Before entering these photographs, we would like to offer a small note about the texts that accompany them.

As Iranian artists working with images deeply rooted in the streets, memories, symbols, and cultural realities of Tehran, we are aware that some of what exists naturally within these photographs may not be immediately visible to a viewer unfamiliar with Iran.

For this reason, we have chosen to accompany each photograph with a short text. These writings are not intended to explain the photographs completely, nor to tell the viewer what to think or how to see them. Rather, they are an attempt to open a door—to provide a little context where cultural distance might otherwise create silence.

Some gestures, symbols, words, historical references, and everyday experiences carry meanings that may be immediately understood by someone who has lived within this culture, but remain invisible to someone looking from elsewhere.

We therefore write not to close the images, but to make their doors slightly easier to find.

The photographs remain open. The embroidery remains open. And the stories we have written are only one possible path into them.

This distance between cultures is also part of what makes this exhibition meaningful to us. It allows these images, born from a very specific place, to begin a conversation beyond it.

We are deeply grateful to Decagon Gallery for giving us the opportunity to bring this body of work into an international context, and for creating a space where these photographs can be encountered by viewers far beyond the streets in which they were made.