February 28th is a printmaking project initiated on the day the United States and Israel began military attacks in Iran. Developed in direct response to unfolding geopolitical events. As images of war, uncertainty and displacement circulated across screens and borders, Mona Tahani entered an extended and intensive period of production. Over the course of one month, the studio became a site of continuous repetition: inking, pressing, layering and erasing performed in a sustained rhythm as works accumulated one after another.
Around 400 prints and 15 handmade artist books emerged through this process, where physical labor became inseparable from anxiety, waiting, and the urgent need to remain connected while witnessing events unfold from a geographical distance, with family and friends in Iran.
The works unfold not as singular images but as accumulation and variation. Repeated gestures generate a visual field shaped by duration, pressure, and exhaustion, where each impression carries the trace of an action rather than a resolved composition. Repetition becomes both structure and condition: a way of continuing to work while absorbing emotional intensity that has no clear outlet, and of maintaining presence through continuous making.
Within this process, printmaking becomes a form of endurance. The physical demands of repetition mirror the psychological condition of suspension — of waiting, receiving fragmented information, and responding to events that remain out of reach. Rather than producing distance from these conditions, the works remain inside them, allowing urgency to take shape through gesture rather than representation.
Tahani’s practice is grounded in a diasporic condition defined by simultaneity — being physically located in Norway while remaining emotionally and affectively bound to events and people elsewhere. Within this tension, making becomes a form of continuous response. The repetitive nature of printmaking transforms into a way of sustaining contact, where physical labor substitutes for distance and becomes a method of holding proximity in the absence of direct presence.
The works carry traces of the human consequences of violence, where figures appear fragmented, unstable, or partially dissolved. They shift between intimacy and distance, never fully settling into one register of reading. At times the imagery suggests proximity and immediacy; at others it opens toward the difficulty of witnessing from afar, where experience arrives in fragments, mediated and incomplete. The artist books extend this logic, functioning as condensed sequences in which repetition, interruption, and accumulation create shifting rhythms of attention.
Rather than functioning as retrospective reflection, February 28th operates in real time, shaped by immediacy and ongoing uncertainty. The works do not seek to stabilise or narrate events, but to remain within their unfolding. In this sense, the project becomes both a record of intensified making and a sustained attempt to transform urgency into material form — where repetition, labor, and endurance replace resolution.
Press release from Kunsthall 3,14
Image: Mona Tahani. Image courtesy of the artist
