PARIS-B is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Franco-Iranian artist Golnaz Payani. Bringing together a series of monumental textile works, À effleurer, se rompre explores the persistence of memory through the disappearance of matter.

Golnaz Payani works across sculpture, installation, film, performance, and poetry, all connected through an exploration of the trace and the threshold of the visible. Shaped by her childhood in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War and her experience of the compulsory veil in adolescence, she has transformed her relationship with textiles: once a toy, then a symbol of oppression, they have become a medium of liberation in her practice. From the tension between a protected private life and a public sphere marked by erasure, she has developed a practice that turns fabric, video, and found objects into vessels for silent narratives.

For Golnaz Payani, art is about giving tangible form to inherited absences and silences. Her work does not simply document the past; it grants autonomy to that which has vanished. Whether manipulating the weave of a fabric, repurposing antique frames, or attending to the off-camera space in her films, her practice carries a ritualistic dimension. She transforms exhibition spaces into places of contemplation, where the gestures of the hands and the symbolism of color become a language capable of preserving the essence of memories otherwise destined for oblivion.

This exhibition, titled À effleurer, se rompre, presents a series of monumental works which made a profound impression during their presentation at the Chapelle Jeanne d’Arc in Thouars. In these works, the act of unweaving is central. Through a meticulous process of subtraction, Golnaz Payani removes threads until the very structure of the textile begins to falter. By stripping the fabric of its primary function, whether covering or ornament, she exposes its inherent fragility: the cloth loses its pattern and practical purpose, yet retains its memory. This laborious, almost sacrificial process transforms the textile into a symbolic unveiling, where opacity gives way to a delicate transparency that allows light and the gaze to circulate, turning fiber into something ethereal.

The works occupy the gallery space like textile molts, architectural skins bearing the imprint of a now-absent body. Suspended and diaphanous, they respond to the slightest movement of air, emphasizing the porous boundary between artwork and environment. In this shivering breath, caught between the desire to touch and the fear of breaking, a vibration haunts the exhibition, highlighting the ambiguity of these pieces that inhabit the space like spectral presences, whose very persistence seems to hang by a thread. They act as a second body, a sensitive interface where the remaining threads trace an identity defined by its hollows.

By inhabiting a space where disappearance and presence coincide, Golnaz Payani transforms the vulnerability of matter into a gesture of silent resistance. Visitors are invited to wander among these vibrating walls. Stripped of their original iconography, these structures fill the space with a new presence: they no longer present a fixed image, but allow us to feel the weight of an absence made tangible. Through À effleurer, se rompre, the artist succeeds in materializing the impalpable, turning void into volume and silence into speech.