GHAZALEH AVARZAMANI

Particular Good Game for Self-Punishment

Multi-media installation
2023

Scratch Me and I’ll Scratch You takes its point of departure from The Stork and the Fox, an ancient fable that stages a cycle of cunning, reciprocity, and moral retribution. In this tale of mirrored deception—where hospitality becomes a form of punishment—the reciprocity of gesture collapses into a theatre of inequity.

The exhibition translates this narrative of exchange and reparation into material form, using butter as both medium and metaphor.

At the center, 500 kg of butter formed a sculpture which responds to its environment—darkening, cracking, and reshaping itself as bodies gather around it—mirroring the way political and social realities are altered through exposure and repetition.

Surrounding feeders, placed just beyond the melting sculpture, contribute to the notion of reparation and atonment. Butter, a substance of transformation and transience, functions here as an unstable sculptural agent—responsive to temperature, proximity, and human presence. It occupies a space between nourishment and decay, between the sacred and the profane. Historically charged as a symbol of survival, wealth, and ritual offering, fat becomes a proxy for knowledge itself: mutable, perishable, and susceptible to its environment.

The exhibition brings together a constellation of paintings and sculptures to consider how systems of hospitality, land, and retribution are mediated and distorted through contemporary narratives. In this configuration, the exhibition invites reflection on the fragile ethics of exchange that bind care to control, and giving to return.