Under The Mango Tree Design Studio

WHAT REMAINS IN PLACE
Pegah Keshmirshekan Pegah Keshmirshekan پگاه کشمیرشکن
Vernissage : 18.06.26
18:30-21:00
Artist is present.
Exhibition: 19.06.26- 02.08.26

Artist statement
“The work begins to function as unstable herbaria of an imagined homeland. A herbarium is a practice of preserving plants by pressing and classifying them, removing them from their natural environment in order to stabilise and archive them. It promises preservation, the possibility of holding what is fragile in place. Yet extinction and diaspora complicate this promise. The textile works become a record of a plant that cannot be fully held in place, whether geographically, ecologically or emotionally.” – Pegah Keshmirshekan, 2026

Foto: Sophie Vale

What remains in place
PEGAH KESHMIRSHEKAN
Vernissage : 18.06.26
18:30-21:00
Artist is present

If not in images, smells and feelings imprinted in one’s heart, where is home? What is the measure of distance that connects one to their home?” Pegah Keshmirshekan, .keshmir born in Tehran and now living in Berlin and London, has followed these root questions in her long-term artistic research into Iran’s native Crown Imperial flower (scientific name Fritillaria imperialis), exploring its use as a symbol
of an imaginary homeland. This bell-shaped wildflower, known as Laleh-ye Vajgun (upside-down tulip) or Laleh-ye Ashk (weeping lily), was brought to Europe in the mid-sixteenth century and was depicted in countless paintings and on ceramic tiles by 1610. In Iranian folklore and in the epic poem Shahnameh by Ferdowsi, the flower is deeply intertwined with Nowruz, the Persian New Year celebration marking the arrival of spring and the renewal of nature, as well as pre-Islamic mythology. Legend has it that it sprouted from the spilled blood of Siavush, a heroic Persian prince. Its homeland, the Zagros Mountains, is a historically unyielding range that is home to many nomadic families. It begins in northwestern Iran, roughly following the western border, and covers much of southeastern
Turkey and northeastern Iraq. The mountains also create a geographic barrier between the Mesopotamian Plain, in modern-day Iraq,
and the Iranian plateau. The Crown Imperial of Zagros is considered a threatened species due to climate change, overgrazing, agricultural changes and unmanaged tourism.

What is an identity that isn‘t a performance, an act of projection, an artifice or a fiction? Humans carry billions of bits of information within them; communities of selves are inscribed on their bodies. They have not one home, but many interconnected ones. The most fundamental question is that of belonging.

- an excerpt from the essay Home as a dense geography of Self by