Not Mine, Not Yours, an exhibition by Mehrdad Shadrooh curated by Barbara Blasi at URBS in Rome, stems from an 80-year family archive bridging Iran and collective memory. Images and videos create an immersive narrative blending the intimate and universal.

A Shared Memory Between Iran and Rome

Rome, April 2026 — On April 30 at 6:30 PM, the exhibition Not Mine, Not Yours by Mehrdad Shadrooh, curated by Barbara Blasi, opens at the URBS space in Testaccio.

The exhibition stems from a family video-photographic archive spanning over eighty years of history, preserved and shared by the artist as an act of openness and restitution. Through intimate images, weddings, everyday moments, fragments of childhood, and scenes of life, a narrative takes shape—expanding from the private into collective memory.

Shadrooh’s gaze is both personal and universal: an emotional journey that reveals a distant Iran, shaped by relationships, freedom, and daily life—elements that are now difficult to recognize. This is not a transformation of matter, but an act of sharing: as the archive opens, it becomes a common space, activating a deep connection between the viewer and what is being shown.

Within the URBS space, the exhibition takes on an immersive dimension. Black-and-white and color photographs, together with videos, intertwine in an image-saturated environment, generating a kind of visual horror vacui that produces harmony and continuity. In this layered landscape, human life emerges as a living presence—a flow of memories that transcends all geographical and cultural distances.

Not Mine, Not Yours is an experience that questions the meaning of belonging and identity, dissolving the boundaries between the individual and the collective: from Iran to Rome, from your family to mine, from your memories to mine—where everything belongs to everyone and, at the same time, to no one.

“URBS was conceived as a space of passage: between different memories, between distant cultures, between what we believe to be ours and what we suddenly recognize as shared. This exhibition makes visible precisely this subtle yet necessary transition between the intimate and the universal.”

Andrea D’Antrassi