Negar Behbahani, Every Night, Three Kisses, 2010. Sound, 5:55

An ambiguity in a relationship presented from a female perspective, from the interior of her bed which becomes stifling — to relay Sadegh Hedayat’s novel in the voice of a female narrator, “And on my chest, I felt the weight of a man’s dead body….”; or to paraphrase Barthes’s The Lover’s Discourse, “the loving subject covers the other with laudatory adjectives; but also, or finally, unsatisfied by this rosary of adjectives, feeling the rending lack from which predication suffers, [s]he comes to seek a linguistic way of addressing this: that the totality of imaginable predicates will never reach or exhaust the absolute specificity of the object of h[er] desire: s[he] moves from polynymy to anonymy. (…) two objects seen as beyond predication either in horror or in desire — the corpse and the desired body.”