Holding the Dilemma, Sitting with the Question

We warmly invite you to join Reyhaneh Mirjahani in activating her participatory installation.
RSVP. contact@sumac.com

For Acts of Conflation, Reyhaneh Mirjahani presents Holding the Dilemma, Sitting with the Question—a participatory installation that invites visitors to sit with discomfort, navigating the unstable ground between action and inaction, resistance and complicity. Drawing on lived experience, it considers how agency is shaped by hesitation, compromise, and constraint, and asks how we might account for more subjective and embodied understandings of agency. Rather than seeking resolution, the work opens a space to examine how we carry, negotiate, or refuse power within structures that limit our capacity to act.

The installation forms Iteration #9 of Mirjahani’s ongoing project An Experiment on Agency (2021–), which investigates how individuals and communities navigate agency under the pressures of socio-political systems, where choices are often constrained, conflicted, or unclear. Under imperialism, colonial legacies, neoliberalism, and ideological authoritarianism, dominant concepts of agency—typically liberal, individualistic, or framed in terms of emancipation—prove inadequate for grasping the complexities of how people negotiate power in everyday life. This project challenges such limitations by creating space for more nuanced, collective, and situated understandings of agency.

Bio. Reyhaneh Mirjahani is an artist with curatorial practice. Her practice operates at the intersection of visual art, curating, research, organizing, publishing, and participatory interventions, employing collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to create discursive spaces that investigate agency, counter-narratives, dilemmas, participation, and the politics of space. She is particularly interested in exhibition-making beyond conventional formats, exploring how artistic interventions can unfold in alternative gathering sites rather than traditional white-cube settings, fostering different forms of engagement. Mirjahani holds an MFA in Fine Art from HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, and has completed the postmaster programs Commissioning and Curating Contemporary Public Art at HDK-Valand and CuratorLab at Konstfack.