BAVAND BEHPOOR

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Gigamesh! Drink and eat, fill your stomach, be joyful day and night! Celebrate every day with joy! Put on neat clothes, freshen your body in fresh water! Be happy in the arms of women!
—Gilgamesh

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In the poem, a scene is described in which a woman is holding a glass of destillated mint in her hands. The bottle in the installation also contains destillated mint.

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A poem by Arthur Rimbaud on one side and a poem by Khayyam in praise of mystical intoxication on the other. Each line of peotry is meant to be read with a sip of wine.

Most of the objects in this section which I call reading machines were part of an interactive installation exhibited at Ave Gallery, Tehran, 2007.

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Once the surface of the plexi-glass is moistened, the text underneath becomes readable. It reads: He remembers for a second, then forgets. As water evaporates, the text becomes unreadable once again. The machine too, eventually forgets what it had expressed.

The machine illustrates an encounter between Rumi and Shams and their mutual attraction reflected in Rumi’s poetry.

A poem by Sa’di written on anti-depression tablets.

A poem by Khayyam, classical Persian epicurean poet whose poetry regrets the brevity and fragility of life.

  The outer cube narrates a man’s everyday thoughts, the inside cube his inner anxieties.

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A pack of cigarettes, each with some lines from Goethe’s opening pages of Faust, describing Faust’s frustration with his own wisdom.
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It is the days of life that counts, not death. Where are you going? You will never find what you are looking for. When gods created man, death was his share—they kept life to themselves. Thus, Gigamesh! Drink and eat, fill your stomach, be joyful day and night! Celebrate every day with joy! Put on neat clothes, freshen your body in fresh water! Be happy in the arms of women! —Gilgamesh

A machine that allows you to read a text one word at a time.

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Each cell is filled with a different kind of spice found in Persian Bazar, corresponding to one line of the poem.

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‘Solo for Two Voices’, by Octavio Paz. The theme of the poem is dichotomies. Certain words of the poem becomes warmer as the installation is switched on.

The Reading Machine accompanying the following text by Immanuel Kant from his Critique of Judgment tries to illustrate Kant’s mode of thinking.

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The following text by David Hume taken from his autobiography is to be read in this Reading Machine while the accompanying blue substance dissolves in water at a very slow rate (the complete dissolution takes days.) This is countered by another machine pictured below accompanying Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s excerpt from Confessions describing his uneasy character. Hume and Rousseau met in their life-time but the two thinkers could not tolerate each other’s temperament.

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This box is for taking a sarcastic refuge from the outside world to the interior world of poetry. The Persian translation of the following poem by René Chare is readable once the viewer is inside it.

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