Gazelli Art House is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition ‘The Dust Became The Breath’, featuring Aidan Salakhova (b.1964), the prominent Azeri artist. The exhibition is an important addition to the gallery’s 10th year anniversary programme, celebrating its history and marking its inception in Baku, Azerbaijan in 2003. Mila Askarova (founding director) says, “we are very proud to have an international platform to showcase important artists from Azerbaijan and to give a voice to the region’s history in the UK. ” The exhibition will debut a series of new artworks by Salakhova.  

Curator Farah Piriye explains, “the exhibition’s title, inspired by Nizami Ganjavi’s ‘The Treasury of Mysteries’ (1163), an ethico-philosophical poem aimed at moral and spiritual guidance, likens dust to the ghosts of our pasts, as the exhibition navigates personal and collective experiences, confronting the challenging aspects of our histories in order to examine our present identities.”  

 ‘The Dust Became The Breath’ builds its narrative around the work of Aidan Salakhova, structuring a decadent discourse on cultural and sexual identity, religion and spirituality, traditional symbols and journeys taken inward. Despite censorship, Salakhova continues to create a controversial and radical body of work, constantly facing social and ethical challenges. Experimenting with implicit forms of time and memory, Salakhova’s body of work elicits a sense of mysticism and transcendence, exploring the nature of feminine presence through time. It allows for simultaneous existence in multiple realities—internally and externally, in the past and present, experiencing and being experienced, while attempting to escape such constraints imposed by the principles of duality; feminine vs masculine, consciousness vs unconsciousness, guilt vs remorse, personal vs public, presence vs absence, past struggles vs present identities, the East vs the West.  

 Going beyond time and space while challenging the persistence of patriarchy by focusing on powerful female personification, the exhibition sheds light on the artist’s personal experiences, as untold stories and social stigmas take their rightful place in public discourse. In an almost Sufi manner, the dichotomy of I-other is transcended, becoming one universal non-duality.