Liquid Fear is a solo exhibition by Vahid Danaiefar at Simbart Projects, Istanbul. The exhibition explores anxiety through the relationship between image, object, and space, focusing on the gradual transformation of the familiar into something strange and unreliable.
Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid fear” and Freud’s concept of the uncanny, the works examine how a sense of familiarity is sustained through everyday objects, habits, and domestic spaces—and what happens when these structures begin to lose their reassuring qualities.
Throughout the exhibition, painted images and physical objects shift between representation and reality. Familiar elements such as a curtain, table, telephone, mirror, and shutter are displaced, repeated, or transformed, creating an unstable relationship between the domestic interior and the world beyond it.
Rather than depicting a specific event, Liquid Fear considers anxiety as a dispersed condition embedded in everyday experience, where the familiar remains recognizable but gradually becomes difficult to trust.