The Presence of The Future was a solo exhibition of Iranian mixed media artist, Peyman Shaafi, displayed at Tabari Artspace Gallery in Dubai.
The selected works, which spanned pen and ink sketches and 3-dimensional canvases, formed an enriching enquiry into the relationships shared between geometry, astrology, and materiality. The artist’s modular works on canvas were rooted in his preoccupation with geometric shapes, which were taken as a symbol of universal harmony across cultures. Observing the world through the interpretive systems of both Western and Persian astrology, Shaafi regarded the universe with awe and understood that we were indivisible from it. Shaafi looked to the future-seekers of the past, such as Nostradamus, to better know the shape of the future. Drawing from this wisdom, the artist maintained that the unprecedented patterns in the skies of the present had given way to the uncharted changes in 2020, which we had begun to witness. In a profoundly personal statement, amidst our ongoing moment of pandemic and social unrest, Shaafi had returned to the purity of these patterns and structures of strict mathematical precision in order to make sense of his chaotic reality. He conflated cosmic energy flows with the satisfying order that geometric rhythms proposed in order to form a fresh space grounded in positivity.