Unsettling Intimacies: On World-Making Practices with the Other in Minoosh Zomorodinia’s Installation <i>Knots and Ripples</i>

This article engages with the installation of the Iranian artist Minoosh Zomorodinia, Knots and Ripples (2017), through what we call "unsettling intimacies". This concept is inspired by philosopher Mariana Ortega's notion of "aesthetic unsettlement". In our reworked application of the concept, we argue that in this mixed-media installation, an unsettling intimacy emerges that connects different tropes of Otherness (migrant and nature) in the context of global climate change. Through our engagement with the installation and conversations with the artist, we suggest that Knots and Ripples enacts a complex, posthuman, affective space of response-ability that draws on poetics, ethics and politics of affective communality beyond the boundaries of human and nonhuman. Following the artist's conceptual metaphor of dakhil (tying a knot into a string for a wish to come true), and connecting it to unsettling intimacies, we engage with water as a posthuman figuration, one that connects an Iranian cultural practice, Islam, a hijab-wearing female artist, water vulnerabilities and more in hopes of liveable futures. Dakhil becomes a collective approach to the idea of thinking the world otherwise, that is to say a world-making practice.