SNAPSHOTS: Daddy Party آن نافه مراد که میخواستم ز بخت درچین زلف آن بت مشکین کلاله بود by Chupan Atashi
Join us for the opening reception of Daddy Party , a new solo exhibition by Chupan Atashi on Thursday, October 2nd 2025, from 6pm at Metro54.The Exhibition will be running from October 2nd – November 29th, 2025. RSVP Here
Daddy Party آن نافه مراد که میخواستم ز بخت درچین زلف آن بت مشکین کلاله بود is a new body of work by Chupan Atashi orbiting themes of pain, care, embodied experience and sexuality within the artist's ongoing excavation of memory. “How can pain potentially be a tool of transformation and overcoming trauma?,” the artist wonders. “The wound must be touched for healing to happen.”
Across sculpture, photography, video, painting, performance and writing, each work in Daddy Party channels a state of transition. Some parts are inevitably decaying, surrendered to time and its agents: bananas and limes compost, potatoes sprout—their roots hanging midair—as part of an organic study developed over two years in the studio. Transformation is rarely neat or linear. It stumbles. It waits. In the absence of the artist, decay and growth entwine in their own unruly continuum—a stretch of suspension that reveals itself to be anything but stillness.
Eyes are blinking, bubbles are popping in the air, a new animal appears. A ritual begins. Amidst colonial collapse—when empire and patriarchy are left to rot, stripped of potency through gestures of sly humour and glittering camp—Daddy emerges. As guide and lover, he takes his beloved on a journey. Let’s vacation with Daddy: follow lines of desire and decompose with pleasure.
Scoop scoop scoop — the chain swings a pulsing rhythm in the artist’s performance New Animals. A series of drawings on paper echo its vibrancy. In the repetitive certainty of pain a threshold can be crossed leading to a state of trance. Here, a space opens up for renegotiation, altering the consciousness in which healing might unfold.
Grief nests deep within this body of work, where the artist tends to wounds with vulnerability. These wounds have been held. You can still see the stitches, carefully placed one by one, but they are beginning to loosen. Life is bursting through the seams. Hands have kneaded, caressed, cut—carving words and leaving messages.سوراخ ,ااف ,هوا, Alef. The repeated presence of the first letter of the alphabet marks a new beginning, where the mythical Simurgh rises from the ashes.
“...I feel a dizzying pressure under my skin. I want to make a hole in everything and penetrate it deep. I want to reach the heart of the earth.”
— Forough Farrokhzad to Ebrahim Golestan
Like Farrokhzad, Atashi seeks to pierce and go below the surface—to descend into depth and allow the depth to enter. In the reconfiguration of self and memory, where past and present rub against one another, a new, provocative self-portrait emerges. The Tehran’s Self Portraits from 2008-2010 resurface in this exhibition, reimagined as Horizon of Ass where the back becomes front, and instead of the face––it’s the anus that speaks: digesting, resisting, addressing from a diasporic position. The juxtaposition of anus and pinhole disrupts regimes of visibility. The body enacts and defines its own exposure.
As the world keeps ticking, Atashi builds their own clock—rhythms of alternate timelines unfold both sonically and visually in the animation Endless Loop. Animals long familiar in the artist’s work return in this atemporal clock, including birds, elephants and two deer who become one. This time, they are with many. They stretch out, multiply themselves, play with one another—as messengers from the infinite subconscious, the dream realm. Visitors are invited to experience Daddy Party in their own time and rhythm: to linger, to wait, to come up close, to zoom in and out, to repeat and to return.
Daddy Party unfolds from within the contradiction of being a collaborative solo exhibition—in the spirit of Metro54’s SNAPSHOTS series, which critically engages with the solo exhibition format. The project includes performances, a polyvocal zine, a public program, t-shirts as wearable ephemera, and the production of a new film. Daddy Party by Chupan Atashi is curated by Radna Rumping and created in collaboration with Saman Mahdavi, YuJing Liu, Amirhossein Sadeghzadeh, Tewa Barnosa, Chaarbeat, Avoidstreet, Maxe Crandall and the team of Metro54.
*“That fragrant pod of desire I sought from fortune, found concealed within my beloved’s balmy curl”
(Hafez, Ghazal 214)