IIn from within, so together at Swan Coach House Gallery, curator Ashley Kauschinger pairs the work of interdisciplinary photographers Mona Bozorgi and Tokie Rome-Taylor, creating a rich dialogue on soft, archival resistance.
Born and raised in Iran and now based in Florida, Bozorgi has watched from afar as her homeland erupted in the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police in 2022. As a form of diasporic participation, Bozorgi prints screenshots of Iranian women’s resistance onto silk, preserving documentation that the regime would erase if she was in reach. She then painstakingly removes the threads in one direction, leaving behind seemingly fragile strands of one of the strongest materials on earth. The space between the threads disrupts the image’s legibility, but the strands coalesce when viewed at a distance: abstracted blood cells merge to form a faint middle finger raised to a head of state.
Two of Bozorgi’s pieces, Monocular II and III (2025), reference the more than 120 protesters blinded by agents’ bullets, displaying the evidence in hand-carved sculptural boxes flayed open on the gallery wall. The forms evoke daguerreotype boxes, a dangerous process in which heated mercury reveals invisible images, paralleling Bozorgi’s careful practice.
Tokie Rome-Taylor’s work fills the voids in her family’s archive left by centuries of anti-Black violence, conjuring speculative visions of survival across generations.. In ripples (2024), three young boys poke sticks at the edge of a river, standing in an orthogonal line that recedes into the horizon. Above the embroidered horizon line, anachronistic photographs of ancestors look out over the boys, as if the realms of the living are separated by a thread.
Rome-Taylor also uses transparent photographs on organza, creating blurred, layered images that evoke how a story fades through time. In Going Home (2024), the image of two young girls walking away is clearest in the middle, underscoring the importance of Rome-Taylor’s commitment to building her children’s archive in the present. The children in her images are surrounded with botanical armor that has sustained her family over time: deep indigo, black-eyed peas, and grains of oryza sativa braided into their hair. Each seed is a metaphor, a lesson, and a prayer.
Fittingly, Kauschinger drew the exhibition’s title from theoretical physicist Karen Barad’s new materialist concept of intraaction, in which physical bodies are not required for one entity to impact another.[1] The curation reveals how beings across time and space are transformed by a dynamic exchange of entangled agency.
Together, Bozorgi and Rome-Taylor’s alternative image-making intentionally resists legibility as a form of plausible deniability, a smart tactic in an era of sloppy, Ctrl+F surveillance by fascist states. In doing so, their work extends photography beyond documentation to engage a methodology of social diffraction, bending light around obstacles that Barad describes as having the power to “creatively repattern world-making practices with an eye to our indebtedness to the past and the future.”[2]
[1] Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
[2] Kleinman, Adam. “Intra-actions (Interview of Karen Barad by Adam Kleinman),” Mousse 34, Summer 2012, p. 16.
