PENDING
Feb 14 – Mar 22, 2026
For a long time, “pending” was not a concept—it was a condition I lived in. A prolonged suspension, like a message sent but never confirmed. Everything was reduced to a single line on a screen: Status: Pending.
In 2023, my last year in Iran, this suspension became something I could almost touch. I spent months staring at applications, waiting for responses that would determine where my life might continue, while the world around me felt as if it were collapsing. I waited for institutions, for answers, for a future—while uncertainty pressed in from every direction. Pending was no longer abstract; it was existential.
Then the circuits of communication were shut down entirely. A nationwide digital blackout rendered voices directionless (Iran, January 2026). Internet and phone services were cut; even satellite connections became unreliable. No images left. No messages arrived. Because of sanctions, even physical mail was impossible. Communication itself was suspended—no longer a bridge between two points, but an extended silence.
In such a condition, the issue is no longer delay; the circuit is severed. When a message cannot reach its destination, the distinction between sender and receiver begins to collapse. Who speaks, and who listens, when transmission never completes? In suspension, every voice is simultaneously sent and undelivered.
PENDING emerged from within this condition. The artists gathered here were not selected to represent a shared geography, origin, or identity. They were not assembled to illustrate a common narrative. Instead, their works appeared as incomplete transmissions already leaning toward one another—resonating through delay, fragmentation, interrupted transmission, and unresolved connection. What binds them is not category, but condition.
Each work resembles a letter written but never delivered, a voice note recorded but never received. The exhibition does not offer a resolved statement; it stages the suspension of meaning itself. What circulates between the works is not a linear story, but disruption, fracture, and partial connection. Grief inhabits this interval—in the space between sending and receiving.
This exhibition unfolds like a letter that may never reach its addressee. It remains intentionally unresolved. In entering this space, you are not merely a viewer; you become part of the incomplete circuit. The roles of sender and receiver blur. Communication loses its reciprocal certainty and becomes an unanswered state.
PENDING is that letter that never arrived. That voice extinguished mid-transmission. We stand together in this shared darkness—not waiting for an answer, but aware that there may be none.
-Aghigh, Feb 11
