Timeline of Creation

• December 2022 – March 2023: Daily self-documentation of hand-object photographs over 100 consecutive nights, plus an “extra night” symbolizing continuation and transcendence.
• April – September 2023: Curation of a global collaborative phase. I invited 100 artists from 36 countries—including Romania—to respond to a selected photograph of mine without using spoken or written language.
• October 2023 – March 2024: International artists submitted visual responses using their own object and hand imagery. Optional texts (max 150 words) were included in their native language.
• April 2024: The full body of work was exhibited at ASR Gallery in Tehran.

Materials & Format

Photographs

• 100 original black-and-white hand-object photographs by the artist
• 100 visual responses from international artists
• Optional texts in multiple languages

Display Method

• 14 × 14 cm photographs printed on gelatin transparencies• Mounted behind glass and fixed with matte killer spray
• Installed with metal fixtures directly onto the exhibition wall, creating a floating visual rhythm across the space

Supporting Media

• Exhibition video (documenting installation, audience interaction, and behind-the-scenes process)
• Wall text and digital archive

Curatorial and Cultural Relevance

Decentralizing authorship and highlighting cross-border discussion, Countdown challenges conventional exhibition formats as a hybrid between a curatorial platform and an immersive artwork.

I believe Countdown fits quite well with MARes's experimental, research-driven approach to modern art. Its construction offers flexible adaptation to gallery environments and encourages ongoing development via future partnerships and responses.

Critical Reception & Panel Discussion

During the Tehran exhibition, a panel discussion with three art critics and a university professor explored the project’s core themes—object symbolism, silence, and cross-cultural artistic dialogue. They emphasized the impact of non-verbal communication and the role of the artist as both creator and curator.

The exhibition was featured in Tajrobeh (Issue 38), where art critic Zarvan Rouhbakhshan analyzed the project’s conceptual structure and its success in building global artistic exchanges through visual language.

Amir Hossein Jabaari also reviewed the show in Iran Newspaper, highlighting its experimental form, cultural significance, and the way it challenged boundaries of expression through photography and collaborative creation.

Project Description

Title: Countdown: 100 Nights Plus Extra One Night
Artist & Curator: Arezu Zargar
Exhibited: ASR Gallery, Tehran – 2024

Bridging individual ritual with worldwide creative conversation, Countdown: 100 Nights Plus Extra One Night is a durational, interdisciplinary, and cooperative artistic effort. Originally a quiet, solitary photographic performance during a time of increased Iranian censorship and social repression, the project evolved as an act of resistance expressed through silent repetition and symbolic gesture.

Starting in December 2022, I shot my own hands holding one item every night for 100 consecutive nights. Captured in black and white, these images employed my hands as the main topic—a representation of presence, effort, opposition, and intimate contact. Though basic in shape, every object was selected for its profound emotional, philosophical, or cultural meaning.

From ancient Iranian mythology, where 100 nights of winter represented difficulty, survival, and the group endeavor of storytelling as a way of enduring, 100 draws. In this way, the project becomes a modern retelling of that legendary fortitude anchored in solitude but eventually expanded through connection.

Experience and Audience Involvement

Even though words were deliberately silenced within the visual interaction, the audience is invited to be an active interpreter observing the intricacies of the hands, the object choice, the implied gestures, and the little emotional resonance of each picture. Visitors are urged to move slowly across the installation, following artistic interactions between artist and respondent throughout cultures.

Photos from many nations are connected on a curated map or key to encourage viewers to look for theoretical correlations and emotional contrasts. Through exhibition catalogues and QR codes, translations of the optional artist statements provide for those wanting to interact with the textual level deepening of experience.

Study components

Based on a philosophical and phenomenological study of how meaning is produced apart from language and how visual narratives can cross political and cultural barriers, this project draws its foundations from Particularly his ideas on ready-to-hand and the relational nature of things, it explicitly draws from the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger thought objects always refer to something beyond themselves; they are never isolated. Chosen not for its beauty but for its conceptual significance, every object in Countdown is a repository of individual history. The hands serve as mediators between body, memory, and object—a worldwide symbol of human presence, inventiveness, and resilience.

The project also investigates cross-cultural cognition via its collective phase: how people from various cultures react graphically to a common prompt and how silence, absence, and uncertainty might be creatively useful instruments.