The play \u201cScorpion\u201d by Reza Daneshvar, completed in the summer of 1969, was published in limited and unofficial copies years after the author\u2019s death. This publication served as the starting point for a multimedia installation at Adapa Gallery to reread the social history, hidden violence, and power relations interwoven in a family\u2019s structure. The play narrates the story of major landowners whose world collapses with the implementation of land reforms. Bahr al-Olum, the family\u2019s grandfather, betrays his leftist grandson, Asad, to preserve his properties. Asad flees with Aliyeh, the bailiff\u2019s daughter, and this escape unveils a repressed secret; Aliyeh is actually the result of the grandfather\u2019s rape of a maid who had hanged herself years ago.<\/p>\n
Upon Asad\u2019s return after ten years, he faces a house devoid of its former authority, the loss of lands, and Aliyeh\u2019s confinement in a mental asylum; a trajectory that transfers revenge and violence across generations. Daneshvar explicitly states the time and place in this work: \u201cThe time of the event is this very era.\u201d The lands of Darreh Sefid and Ganjabad, alongside urban spaces such as the school, asylum, mosque, and bazaar, transform into a historical geography accumulating class memory. Ownership in \u201cScorpion\u201d is tied to bodily control and hierarchy; a structure where Bahr al-Olum\u2019s patriarchal authority and its consequences devour the lives of subsequent generations.<\/p>\n
The genesis of this installation, exhibited at Adapa Gallery from October 31 to November 7, 2025, was a close reading of the text and its connection to lived experience. In \u201cScorpion\u201d, the political flows through silences, everyday routine, and suspended states. The incompleteness of actions and the castration of characters reflect living under the shadow of these power structures. In the gallery space, attaching the image of a scorpion\u2019s tail to the main image creates a metaphor for this continuous wound. The combination of threads with a video of daily life and the incomplete actions of figures at a dining spread where the absence of victims is palpable, alongside the sounds of cutlery and whispers, creates an audio-visual space to reflect the persistence of the past and the repetition of control.<\/p>\n\n \n
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