Saffron, Silence, and the Coming Ruin:
A Review of Omid Asadi’s Unfinished Sentences
“Saffron, Silence, and the Coming Ruin” is a reflective essay on Omid Asadi’s installation Resonance and Remnants. It examines witnessing as an ethical act and explores how memory, silence, and resistance shape diasporic art. The text treats criticism less as interpretation and more as a way of holding space for survival and testimony.
The essay centers on Asadi’s practice following his achievement of winning the Independent Creative of the Year award in late 2024 at the Manchester Culture Awards and the nomination of his Castlefield Gallery exhibition for Best Exhibition of the Year. I wrote it before the Iran–Israel war, yet its themes of premonition, ruin, and fragile hope have become newly and painfully resonant. The ruins keep coming back.
As war once again looms on Iran’s horizon, Omid Asadi’s installation re-emerges not just as a memory, but as a mirror, a haunted threshold that asks: what does it mean to witness the ruin before it happens?
In late November 2024, Omid Asadi was honored with the “Independent Creative of the Year” award at the Manchester Culture Awards, and his recent exhibition, Omid Asadi (2023–24) at Castlefield Gallery, was nominated for “Best Exhibition of the Year.” Having known Omid and his practice for years, I reached out to congratulate him on this well-deserved recognition and to discuss his recent accomplishments. In doing so, I have chosen to focus my critical review on a single installation from the show, rather than attempting to survey the entire exhibition. This approach allows for a more concentrated and nuanced analysis of Asadi’s evolving artistic vision.
In Omid Asadi’s “Resonance and Remnants,” the installation unfurls like the aftermath of a bombed house, its framework fractured, its threshold guarded by a lingering aura of absence. The viewer stands before a gaping space where bricks lie scattered like abandoned sentinels, and yet certain precious relics persist, strangely untouched. A carpet, still vibrant and inviting, stretches toward the ruined interior, beckoning without permitting entry. Beneath that silent invitation quivers a carpet of delicate dandelions, each seed poised between memory and erasure. To step inside would mean to scatter these fragile spores of meaning and disturb a silence so thick it seems to press against the lungs.
Yet silence is not absolute, and this is one of the work’s more subtle revelations. From somewhere within this disembodied shell, the low murmur of recorded literature and lullabies hovers in the air, as if voices from a distant past have found tenuous shelter here. The building’s spirit has not fled; rather, it has condensed into a ghostly intellectual presence—a philosophical echo that refuses to vanish despite the house’s physical destruction. The scent of saffron drifts like an elegy, weaving together distant childhoods, unreachable dreams, and histories laden with both political and personal weight. Instead of offering a gentle, bittersweet balm, these sensations present a raw confrontation. They warn us against clinging to a comforting nostalgia that would sweeten the bitterness of what has been lost.
To fully appreciate “Resonance and Remnants,” one might consider the cultural and historical resonances that hover, unspoken, around the installation. The image of a bombed house suggests the aftermath of conflict, whether actual warfare or metaphorical struggles within a personal or collective psyche. This resonates even more pointedly when considering Asadi’s own background: the artist spent his childhood in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War and amid the revolutionary upheavals that reshaped Iranian society. The lingering trauma and the collective scars from that era swirl through this piece, informing its tension and the uneasy alliance of pain and memory that pervades it. The saffron, a spice deeply rooted in Middle Eastern and South Asian traditions, evokes culinary and cultural richness, as well as the persistence of life and identity amid upheaval. The presence of lullabies and recorded literature hints at oral traditions, memory passed down through storytelling, and the intellectual inheritance of past generations. Here, language persists where architecture fails. Ideas outlast their physical vessels, lingering like stubborn phantoms that remind us human culture can never be fully extinguished, even when walls crumble.
In crafting this environment, Asadi does more than just assemble materials—he conjures a scene steeped in tension and contradiction. The dandelions are not random adornments. They serve as symbolic barricades, tender yet impenetrable. The viewer can see and perhaps even feel their fragile presence, but cannot cross the threshold without irrevocably altering the tableau. This is a crucial dynamic: the installation implicates the viewer, making it clear that entering the space would be an act of destruction rather than communion. In this way, the work probes our role as witnesses to suffering. Are we passive observers, safely outside the ruin, or potential participants in the fragile ecosystem of memory and meaning? Every step we consider taking would smash these delicate seeds, dispersing their essence and breaking the silence that has settled over this spectral domain.
The “house” remains both open and closed, accessible and forbidden. It is a threshold that stirs questions of belonging, displacement, and the ethics of intrusion. We are beckoned forward, drawn by the carpet’s inviting hue, yet simultaneously reminded that crossing over would violate the sanctity of the scene. In a world where images of ruined homes flood our news feeds—whether through wars, natural disasters, or economic collapse—“Resonance and Remnants” invites a different kind of reflection. It is not enough to merely acknowledge devastation; we must also reckon with how we approach it, how we think about it, and how we honor what is lost.
This installation becomes, then, a philosophical puzzle that resists easy answers. The interplay of objects—bricks, carpet, dandelions, and recorded voices, creates a kind of conceptual collage. Each element feels laden with significance, and yet their arrangement resists neat interpretation. The piece suggests that memory, suffering, and identity are too complex to be fully articulated. They hover beyond the grasp of language, like seeds that slip through one’s fingers. Asadi’s work compels us to ask: Can we ever truly understand the weight of another’s history, especially one forged in wartime and revolution, or do we merely circle its perimeter, taking in impressions without touching its core?
The sensory experience here is key. The carpet’s colors, the scent of saffron, the whispered lullabies, and the scattered bricks that once formed a home’s structure, all layer upon one another. The work appeals not only to the intellect but also to the body. You feel the dust, the dryness in your throat, the tension in your muscles as you hover at the threshold. In a gallery setting, where one might expect clearer narratives or more obvious symbolic gestures, “Resonance and Remnants” refuses such simplifications. Instead, it mimics the disorienting experience of encountering ruins in the real world ( be those literal or metaphorical ) where histories collide and the mind scrambles to piece together what might have happened, who lived here, and what their lives meant against the background of societal upheaval and war.
Ultimately, “Resonance and Remnants” avoids tidy resolutions. It does not reassure; it does not offer a comforting arc of tragedy and redemption. Instead, it leaves the viewer suspended within the unresolved tension of memory and loss. The delicate network of images, scents, and sounds coalesces into an elegy for unspent lives, illusions of safety, and the fragile layers that constitute our notions of home and belonging. Nostalgia here is not a lullaby but a jolting reminder that what once was may never be fully reclaimed or understood. The result is an experience that demands we look more closely at the residues of history and imagination. After the dust settles, after the bricks have fallen and the walls have cracked open, all that’s left is the persistent question: What remains, and what must we make of it?
In this sense, Asadi’s work is both a challenge and an invitation. It dares us to witness devastation and refuse to look away. It encourages us to sense the weight of saffron’s aroma, to hear the whisper of old stories, and to imagine the lives that once filled this space with laughter, argument, and song—lives shaped by war and revolution, yet still richly human. “Resonance and Remnants” insists that we embrace the complexity of these echoes, taking their presence not as a final answer but as a beginning: an opening toward understanding that will forever be incomplete, and yet all the more powerful for its incompleteness. Ironically, the artist’s very name, Omid, means “hope” in Persian, allowing a quiet promise to hover, even in the midst of so much loss.