The golden stairs

Aidan Salakhova

June 8th – July 21th

Aidan Salakhova (1964) is a multidisciplinary artist from Azerbaijan, born in Moscow and living in Carrara, Italy. In 2011 she was censored by her country’s governmental institutions at the 54th Venice Biennale. The most controversial work was ‘Black Stone’, in which Salakhova depicts the black stone of Mecca, which *pilgrims kiss, surrounded by a vaginal form.

In ‘L’Escala Dorada’, the artist resignifies the iconography of Islam by speaking about the feminine inner world and the need to vindicate it in a universal patriarchal context. The black veiled presences are the powerful personification of women in a time in which the discovery of pleasure and desire through the body is the path to knowledge and freedom.

According to Islam, God’s peace is veiled by seventy thousand “curtains of light and darkness”, without which all that his gaze penetrates would be consumed. In Salakhova’s work, the hijab presents a double reading: it is a symbol of domination, but, at the same time, of transcendence. The veil is re-signified as an intermediary to isolate women from the outside world and to enter the path of self-knowledge and self-exploration. In a system built by codes that do not take into account feminine desire, Salakhova proposes an inner recollection to reconsider inherited ideas and build a being-being in a conscious community, where internal and collective existence coexist in harmony.