My Whole Being Is a Dark Verse curated by Chus Martínez with works by Alexa Karolinski/Ingo Niermann, Sofia Karim, Maryam Tafakory
Opening: September 11 – 13, 2026 Friday: 12 noon – 9pm // Saturday/Sunday: 11am – 6pm Duration: September 15 – October 17, 2026
I have noticed that lately I keep returning to the time I spent in Iran in my mid-twenties. I have never spoken about it publicly, because I never saw a reason to. And yet, those months were crucial both to my life and to my personal development. Nowhere else have I experienced such a brutal discrepancy between the image of a place conveyed by the media and the place itself. Nowhere else have I felt such a strong desire to share with others what I experienced and what I learned from the people and the culture. It was there that I first experienced poetry as a language of resistance. Poetry is of fundamental importance in every culture, but the knowledge people there possessed of their poets was so powerful and unique that it moved me deeply. The poet who captured my heart in particular was Forugh Farrokhzad. “My whole being is a dark verse” or, depending on the translation, “All my being is a dark verse” is the opening line of her poem Another Birth (Tavallodī Dīgar, یدلوت رگید( .
