GHAZALEH AVARZAMANI

Desire Is Tender Is Love Is Love
Glycerine Soap, Wood
56x19.5x30 in. (142x49x76 cm)
2018

Desire Is Tender Is Love Is Love—a title borrowed from Subversive Economies by Daniella Valz Gen—takes the form of two large, translucent soap blocks whose colour, shape, and opacity subtly change over time through exposure to the environmental conditions of the site. By using soap as material for a minimalist sculpture, rather than the more permanent materials typically associated with large-scale sculpture, the work offers a meditation on time and memorialization. Here, soap is used to suggest the impossibility of a “clean slate”—the soap will eventually break down but will not serve its usual purpose of cleaning. Through this continuous transformation, the work remains in-progress and is never quite complete. Open to interpretation, it is a quiet meditation on the human condition that entails a continuous process of learning, unlearning, forgetting and remembering.