Verses of Destruction
2025Verses of Destruction is a typographic installation and performance staged at Royal Academy of Art The Hague, Gallery 3, carried by a single motif, destruction as a force that gives shape to what comes after it, the ground from which meaning grows back. Reinterpreting a poem by the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez, the work sits at the space between power and language, staging the collapse of one and the endurance of the other through fragments of stone, cement blocks, soil, and burnt paper inscribed with verses, unstable lettering, and crumbling, imperfect ornament, a landscape built by hand from the same materials it mourns. At its centre is the idea of metamorphosis, the belief that no power holds its shape forever, civilizations rise and dissolve, tyranny gives way to ruin, and what stands tall today is already becoming tomorrow's ground.
During the performance, the poem was read aloud in Farsi and English while fragments of it were carved into stone, an act of holding memory against its own disappearance that carried the installation's central tension between what is written and what is lost. The sound of carving moved through the gallery, human and unscripted, drawing visitors closer into the presence of language being shaped and worn away at once.