The work Insomnia is rooted in the campaign “No to Executions Tuesdays.” In February 2023, political prisoners in Iran began a hunger strike held every Tuesday in protest against the continued use of the death penalty.
Insomnia is an installation of ceramic slippers arranged in a repeated formation. The slippers are based on documentary photographs taken in the moments immediately preceding execution, pointing to the body’s impending absence while marking the threshold between life and erasure. Their repetition evokes both individual lives and the systemic logic that renders them anonymous. Ceramics—a fragile, earthbound, and historically charged material—embody this precarious in-between state, reinforcing the tension between vulnerability, absence, and survival.
Against this backdrop, the installation examines mechanisms of political erasure through the notion of the state of exception—a condition in which legal protections collapse and human life is rendered expendable. The poem Insomnia by Iranian poet Mohammad Mokhtari, written on the slippers, articulates this process through metaphor and layered language. His words expose enduring structures of silencing and violence while functioning as a fragile archive, preserving memory precisely where the state seeks to erase it.