Afruz Amighi

We have been waiting for you to come. The preparations have beenunderway for some time. We have grown accustomed to the blare of horns, the bustle, the idea. From across the ocean your clear shadow stretches over our city, so far from god. And now your arrival is immanent.

Still I wonder how we will greet you. And what exactly it is that you will see. All the old idols have been undug. We have driven back time “before alphabets and numbers, the altar and the law.”* The hum of work fillseverything, along with our anticipation.

But after these years of great labor, will we find solace by your side? The paranoia, we sit with it and eat it in every grain. We carry on like this, making new idols. Even in our ungoverned hours, we are possessed by the spectre of you.

––Afruz Amighi

Afruz Amighi received her MFA from New York University in 2007. Her work has been presented internationally at the V&A Museum, London; the 55th International Venice Bienniale; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; The National Museum, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; The Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham; The National Museum, Damascus; Beiteddine Palace, Lebanon; Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization, UAE; Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul; La Villa des Arts, Casablanca, Morocco; and Museum of Fine Art, Houston. Her work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the V&A London; MFA Houston; Bristol Museum, UK; and the Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi. The artist was born in Tehran and lives and works in Brooklyn.

*Paz, Octavio. "I Speak of the City." A Tree Within. Trans. Eliot Weinberger. 7th ed. New York: New Directions Press, 1987, 1988. 31-37.