House of Rats

Jean Laplanche, among the most astute interpreters of Freud, posited that human subjectivity emerges from the infant’s desperate attempt to make sense of a world of symbols, phrases, and gestures within which it finds itself suddenly, and traumatically, inundated. To be new in the world is to be overwhelmed by both its novelty and by the task of decoding its ciphers. What Laplanche calls “enigmatic messages” are those moments of frustration which are not, and cannot be, resolved: messages incomprehensible to the infant and, more often than not, unintelligible to the transmitter themselves as a primal, instructive scene. They are an “alien inside me, and even one put inside me by an alien.” With House of Rats, Rasoul Ashtary offers form to the enigmatic we each carry with us from infancy. A skeletal tree repeats, inverted, against a backdrop of shapes almost bodily in their fleshy bulbousness (are our bodies not the first and most enduring alien objects we must try and fail to decode?). A skull, that eternal signifier of death, is relegated to the realm of images through the screen of a camcorder. Alongside a tangle of near-machinic apparati—a series of forms and voids tantalizingly close to being intelligible as a system—an egg holds the promise of the symbolic and the horror of obscurity in the balance. In Laplanche’s formulation, the alien—the unknown that remains unknown—has more to teach us about the world than any meaning we may ultimately decipher. We lodge these enigmatic moments in our unconscious, and their mystery shapes our being, our ability to inquire and deduce as well as our apprehension of that which we cannot work out. Therein lies our capacity for longing, suspicion, superstition, magic. —Holly Bushman Rasoul Ashtary (b. 1991, Tehran, Iran) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. House of Rats is his first major solo exhibition with Lomex and his first exhibition in the United States. Ashtary graduated from Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2022 where he studied with artist Willem de Rooij. His paintings and sculptures experiment with differing forms of visual mediation, distortion, and altered modes of perception.