Hooves, 66 Gallery, Tehran 2010
“The twenty drawings and eight paintings by Shahpour Pouyan of bull hooves are suggestive of many things, including the relationship of the animal to the rural context in which they toil and where, for centuries, they have performed the role of the enslaved domestic help. They are also reminiscent of the centuries’ old cultural tradition of the Golden Bull, where the bull was the most sacred of beasts, often associated with fertility, or even divinity, in aspects of Sumerian and Babylonian culture or, further east, enshrined in the living tradition of the sacred cow in Hinduism. Bull hooves in Iranian culture are also known as a symbol of masculinity and strength, representing the power to dominate, and ultimately, as symbols of power. The bull, it seems, has veered between the prominent and the mundane for a very long time. In this deranged arrangement of a post modernity, supplemented by a broadband of signs and signifiers, of access and nonsense, a poetic otherness is developed, as a language is formed that proposes and supposes the particularities of this age, where control and freedom remain institutionalized.” -Shaheen Merali, 2010