Neda Razavipour's Oscillation: A Performance of Precarious Balance

Iranian artist Neda Razavipour presents her latest performance work, Oscillation, at Galerie Etemad in Tehran in 2014. The piece involves the artist meticulously arranging fragile tableware—opaline, ceramic, porcelain, glass, crystal—in a cabinet, then deliberately overturning it, creating chaos. She repeats this cycle daily for a week, collecting broken shards on trays. Unlike her earlier participatory work Self-Service (2009, Galerie Azad, Tehran; 2012, Cité des Arts, Paris), the audience here remains outside the scene, confronted with themselves. The performance critiques contemporary Iranian society and the regime's systematic erasure of historical memory, reflecting the instability of life in Tehran under an ultrareligious government, economic volatility, and destruction of cultural heritage. The resulting debris becomes an aesthetic of waste and ruins, questioning the value of objects and the past. The work was featured alongside the exhibition Unedited History at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which focuses on modern and contemporary Iranian art.