Farhad Ahrarnia participates in The Manifest, The Hidden (15 January – 12 April 2026) with two significant works, At the Top of My Voice (2019) and Call to Account (2018), which together exemplify his sustained engagement with geometry, language, and the politics of visibility.
The exhibition brings together eleven contemporary artists working across the Middle East, North America, and Europe, exploring the entanglement of Geometry and Islam as expansive, generative systems rather than rigid structures. Referencing the Qur’anic attributes of God—al-Ẓāhir (the Manifest) and al-Bāṭin (the Hidden)—the exhibition frames reality as a continuous dialogue between what is outwardly perceived and what is inwardly contemplated. Ahrarnia’s practice operates precisely within this tension.
In At the Top of My Voice (2019), Ahrarnia mobilises geometric form as a carrier of both urgency and restraint. The work suggests an act of vocalisation that is simultaneously amplified and contained—where expression reaches its limits yet remains embedded within ordered systems. Geometry, often associated with transcendence and harmony in Islamic visual traditions, becomes in Ahrarnia’s hands a site of friction, where personal, political, and collective voices intersect. What is spoken is made manifest through form, yet the full weight of meaning remains partially concealed, resonating in the work’s silences as much as its structures.
Call to Account (2018) further extends this inquiry, engaging ideas of responsibility, authority, and historical reckoning. The work invokes geometry not as a neutral aesthetic device, but as a language shaped by power, belief, and governance. Here, mathematical precision mirrors moral and social scrutiny—what is measured, ordered, and revealed on the surface emerges from deeper, often obscured processes of judgement and control. The piece reflects the exhibition’s central premise: that visible structures are inseparable from invisible forces.
Across both works, Ahrarnia draws attention to the dual nature of systems—whether mathematical, theological, or sociopolitical. Like a geometric proof that emerges from intuition and experimentation, his artworks reveal themselves gradually, inviting viewers to move beyond immediate perception toward reflection and inward experience.
Within The Manifest, The Hidden, Ahrarnia’s contribution underscores how geometry can function as both a tool of expression and a site of interrogation. His works do not simply illustrate the relationship between the visible and the invisible; they actively inhabit it, reminding us that meaning is always negotiated between what is shown and what remains unseen.
Through At the Top of My Voice and Call to Account, Farhad Ahrarnia offers a powerful meditation on how form can speak—quietly or forcefully—across cultural, spiritual, and political registers, echoing the exhibition’s invitation to encounter geometry and Islam as living, dynamic languages of thought and experience.
