October 3 – November 14, 2026
Artist Talk: Saturday, November 7, 5:30pm
Artists Reception: Saturday, October 3, 4–6PM
SFArtsED gallery, 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco.
Seyed Alavi: Layla / Majnun
Available Works
Seyed Alavi: Layla and Majnun
Inspired by the 12th-century poem by poet Nizami Ganjavi, Seyed Alavi’s solo exhibition Layla and Majnun reinterprets the ageless tale of love, longing and separation through an immersive display of two juxtaposed textile series which hang suspended in the gallery. Presented against a backdrop of dark blue walls, the installation invites the viewer to consider the physical distance between these two archetypal lovers to be a construct.
Besotted by Layla, Majnun obsessively serenades her with poetry, leading to condemnation by Layla’s father, who forbids their love and forces her to marry another. A banished Majnun turns to the forest to live in exile amongst the animals as Layla perishes of a broken heart. In spite of their separation and physical distance, their bond transcends the material world to form an iconic tale of eternal love.
At human scale, the seven tapestries depicting Majnun confront viewers as they enter the space. Machine-generated calligraphic lines form his figure, resembling writing yet remaining void of any legible meaning. Fluctuating between abstraction and figuration, Majnun exists in a state of perpetual formation. His levitating body suggests a state of transcendence and focus while the unraveling materiality of the tapestries evokes the unruly nature of a figure whose name has become synonymous with madness.
Weaving together the visual languages of Persian miniature painting and rug design, the series of works depicting Layla invites viewers to reimagine the distinction between figure and ground. Morphing patterns and motifs make her presence inseparable from her surroundings, her apparition reemerges in the gallery as if manifested through hallucination or dream. Subtle variations of hand gesture and shifting form define each of her unique appearances, her gaze following the viewer throughout the room, endlessly in search of Majnun.
Employing a wide range of artistic tools and mediums ranging from recent advances in sublimation-dye rug printing, collage, digital manipulation and AI-assisted image processing, Seyed approaches this body of work foremost through his exploration of how meaning and perception are created through the construction of language and form.
Seyed Alavi received a B.S. from San Jose State University and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work explores the poetics of language and space and their capacity to shape perception and reality. He has created site-specific installations and public art projects throughout the United States and internationally, including at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and Capp Street Project in San Francisco. Alavi has received fellowships and grants from the NEA/US-Japan Creative Artists’ Fellowship, California Arts Council, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Creative Work Fund, among others. He has taught at institutions including SFMOMA, California College of the Arts, and UC Davis, and has participated in residencies including the Capp Street Project and Djerassi Foundation. He lives and works in Oakland today.
Performance: Layla and Majnun
Created in collaboration with Seyed Alavi and in response to his exhibition, this dance-based work activates the liminal spaces between viewers and artworks in the gallery. Drawing on Alavi’s image manipulation and re-assembly techniques, the performers reimagine figure-ground relationships and explore the tensions between presence and absence, longing and love.
With performances by a group of the SFArtsED Players:
Agnes Post, Aida Samimi, Asher Wofford, Augustine Berenguer, Eve Belopolskaya, Liliana Dawson, Mira Woerner, Olivia Gale, Rosie Thau, Sage Zamora, Selah McGinley-Pak.
Directed by: Natalie Greene, in collaboration with Emily Keeler and Tiersa Nureyev and Pete Belkin
Sound Direction by Stephen Parris.
Presented alongside the exhibition is a series of student-made collages combining multiple self-portraits captured from different perspectives.
