If a body (container) can be made of a soul (contained), what kind of a body would it be? Mahsa Aleph presents the possibility of raising such intellectual question through a metaphor: containers that have found the same nature as their contained (the plate becoming the bread becoming the plate), bringing the audience into an encounter with a pendulum situation.
A container made of the contained (plates made of bread) signals to the possibility of placing yet another contained in the now-container, and this deconstructed situation makes possible a trailing symbolization of the instable position of the container and the contained.
In her project, in addition to this suspended implication, the artist also refers to a social theme in the relationship between the container and the contained: the hidden layer in the metaphor of “bread as a plate:” that of the historical reverence of bread, its significance for life.
While Mahsa Aleph refers to the pendulum state of bread as both a plate serving something and the something served on a plate, the reverence of bread is in and of itself a narrative, adding on to her multiplied narrations. The dignity of bread ties to the expansive concept of the daily meal of the people from the land of Iran, in which eating bread equals eating food, equals having a life and being alive.
As Attar writes, in the voice of the lunatic, in his Mosibat Nameh [Book of Suffering], “During the famine of Nishabur, I did not hear the call to prayer, nor saw the door of any mosque open, and it was as such that I realized that the grand name of God is bread. But this shall not be uttered anywhere.”
Text by Omid Qajarian