Color Theory (2025)
Color Theory , bandages and ink, 2025 -Close up
Color Theory
Color Theory transforms everyday medical bandages into a poetic language of resilience, healing, and identity. Installed along the architectural edges of a space, the bandages—dyed in tones of brown, yellow, black, and white—carry fragments of playful, ironic, and absurd text such as “BBBBlack is ordinary,” “WHITE = too much,” and “V!O!L!E!T glitch.”
These phrases, stitched into color, hover between sense and nonsense, critique and humor, echoing how identity and race are often reduced to labels. The work destabilizes such categories by turning the bandage—a symbol of care, injury, and recovery—into a surface for language that resists stability.
As the installation traces the seams of the building, it also traces the seams of memory and history, suggesting how identities are wrapped, covered, and sometimes allowed to heal. Color Theory is modular and site-specific, adapting to the architecture it inhabits, always reconfigured to speak to a new audience and space.
Notes on Color Theory
With Color Theory (2025), Amir Zainorin transforms the everyday medical bandage into a material for language, identity, and healing. Bandages, usually associated with injury and care, are reimagined here as fragile carriers of text. Dyed in tones of brown, yellow, black, and white, they stretch across the architectural seams of a space—skirting boards, thresholds, and doorframes—marking edges that are often overlooked.
On their surface appear fragments of playful and absurd text: “BBBBlack is ordinary,” “WHITE = too much,” or “V!O!L!E!T glitch.” These phrases, drawn from conversations, media, and interventions, hover between critique and humor. They expose how color is often used as shorthand for identity, while at the same time resisting fixed meaning. Some texts remain clear, others fade or distort, reflecting the instability of identity categories and the way language itself slips, repeats, or glitches.
The choice of bandages is deliberate. They protect wounds but also signal recovery. In Color Theory, they embody the tension between injury and healing, between being marked and being cared for. By writing onto bandages, Zainorin suggests that identity is provisional—tender, shifting, and in need of care.
As a site-specific installation, Color Theory adapts to each place it inhabits. First unfolding in Zainorin’s 2025 solo exhibition Rhythm of Identity at Kunstpakhuset, Ikast, it will later take shape in new forms at Museo delle Mura in Rome in 2026. Each installation responds to its architecture, tracing new edges and creating fresh resonances.
Color Theory extends Zainorin’s long-standing engagement with materials that carry cultural and personal charge—from atlas pages and passports to x-rays and traditional instruments. Here, color becomes not a stable system of classification but a site of play, tension, and resistance. The bandages mark wounds, but they also propose the possibility of healing, inviting audiences to reconsider how color and identity are bound—and how they might be unwrapped, reimagined, and transformed.
Technical Details
- Materials: Dyed gauze bandages with text
- Dimensions: Variable, site-specific
- Requirements: Architectural surfaces (walls, edges, doors)
- Adaptability: Fully modular; responds to architecture of site
Exhibition History
- Kunstpakhuset, Ikast, Denmark (2025, solo exhibition Rhythm of Identity)
- Museo delle Mura, Rome, Italy (2026, solo exhibition)
Color Theory test Installation, home studio, 2025 -Close up
Color theory-Corridor Intervention - Schedule Installation at Museo Della Mura, Rome in 2026
Photography, digital drawing and AI generated (assisted).
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