Sahar Ghavami Tell Me When It Rains (2022)

encadré: 50h × 30w cm

Acrylic on canvas

The work unfolds within a dream logic shaped by repetition, memory, and deferred encounter. Over a sustained period of three years, the same figure returns to the artist in her dreams: unchanged, suspended outside linear time, while recognition remains asymmetrical. Only the central subject recalls; this persistence of memory positions her within a solitary continuity of grief. The condition of the work is structured through delay. The phrase “tell me when it rains” establishes a threshold that is both simple and unattainable, linking reunion to an external event that may never occur. Within this framework, longing is not only temporal but environmental, dependent on a condition that remains out of reach. As the artist notes, “she lives in a place where rain is rare, where the sky withholds, season after season, and so the meeting keeps not happening, and the heart stays what it is in this painting: a small boat, adrift, on fire, waiting for something the climate may never offer”. Ghavami’s engagement with dream states informs the composition’s internal logic. Forms operate with fluid continuity, resisting fixed boundaries between presence and absence, memory and projection. The image remains in motion, where connection persists as possibility.