Continuing through October 31, 2026
In Shaghayegh Cyrous’ multimedia installation “Breathe the Sun” a vivid cast of characters perform ritualized movements in a wall-length video projection. Discrete chapters of the film are intercut with quotes from the Bundahishn, the Zoroastrian creation story, such as “Fire, whose radiance is from endless hope,” transitioning between scenes. A selection of objects hangs throughout the room, many framed in orange painted boxes, along with a secondary screen and a whirling, potted cypress tree. With this precise arrangement, the Iranian American artist creates an immersive, ritualistic space that acknowledges and bridges the physical and cultural distance between North America and Iran. “Think good thoughts, speak good words, do good deeds.”
In the large video, six figures in a convivial mood sit or stand around an open, smoking stone hearth. The hearth’s perimeter is peppered with potted red carnations, and the film’s speed is slowed, producing a dreamlike effect. One person drums, two play the sitar, and three others dance, sometimes holding a gold ball or a large pomegranate. Dark veils appear, obscuring elements of the scene. Figures disappear. “At first this entire creation was one drop of water,” the screen reads. In another scene, two figures — one with gold-painted wings and one tossing a gold ball — turning towards and away from the camera with repetitive gestures.
Another sequence shows two similarly dressed women standing in a river, their palms painted red. In another closely cropped scene, hands write on an egg with black conte crayon. The writing smudges as the egg is turned in the hands, and more of its surface fills with Farsi script. The egg breaks. The camera follows the yolk through the landscape. In a final sequence, a man and a woman attend to an Edenic tree that is decorated with hand-drawn faces. The leaves and figures resonate, out of focus.
As with most of the scenes, the camera remains close-cropped, eschewing peripheral vision. One cannot situate the figures in a larger context. An effective precariousness is thus imbued in the experience of watching. Wondering what’s beyond the camera brings to mind the US-Iran war, now going on seven months. “In time, what is built falls down.” The film begins again, again with quotes from the Bundahishn, and again we see the figures celebrating around the circular hearth.
Bundahishn is a landmark text of Zoroastrian and pre-Zoroastrian teachings thought to have been compiled in the 8th and 9th centuries. It documents the story of creation, a primordial struggle between good and evil, and the creator’s strategy to limit that otherwise unbounded struggle by introducing time. The Bundahishn goes on to describe the creatures born of that same finite world, their eventual demise, and their resurrection. Although the viewer cannot see beyond the frame of each immediate scene, Cyrous provides a larger epistemological framework with this text that at once recalls a deeply human epoch, and the historical shift from Zoroastrianism to Islam.
The rest of the black-box gallery contains elements featured in or resonant with the film: The faces that first appear in the film’s tree are arranged on the wall. A large bronze padlock hangs beside a long braid. The braid references the Women, Life, Freedom Movement, when women began cutting their hair in response to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in custody after being detained by Iran’s morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. The spinning cypress tree, like a resilient and celebratory dancer, joins the projected figures on the wall. An ivory flute is similarly mounted on the wall. A long painted tapestry hangs down the wall and spills onto the floor.
A second screen faces the larger projection, featuring one of the same actors in a stewardess hat, painting her hand red. She sits cross-legged and alone in a room watching the larger projection. Her gaze underscores the insurmountable distance between her relative position and the group in the larger projection.
Cyrous arrived in the U.S. in 2011, following the political tensions of the Iranian Green Movement. She first drew attention for insightful reflections on the Iranian diaspora with her Clarion Alley murals in the Mission District, where love and longing for a homeland are as evident as that same homeland’s critique, protest, and resonant sympathy. The Bundahishn, too, is inflected with a colonial and diasporic history, having been introduced to the West in 1755 by the first French Indologist, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron.
Cyrous is exceedingly conscious of how identity and nationalism can be instrumentalized against the organic pulse of cultural connection. Her work responds to American bigotry, including the 2024 travel ban, while marking lives taken by Iran’s theocracy in the 2019 protests, and valorizing the resilience of Iranian women. “Breathe the Sun” gathers a complex web of place, identity, and kinship, creating a portal through which we can grasp past and present at once. “Scattered about in the earth, it grew again and returned with increase.”
