A 4-minute, 18-second 16mm film stands at the center of Shirana Shahbazi's exhibition "All at Once. An Interplay with Li Tavor," opening at the Kunstmuseum Luzern in 2026. The film, An Other Place (2023), is projected in a darkened alcove and shows a small geometric room — something like a balsa-wood architectural model — set against a two-toned red background. An unseen light moves across it, and a different composition emerges with every frame: film grain, geometric shapes and blocks of color in dialogue within the four boundaries of the shot.

Seeing her still aesthetic animated amounts to a deconstruction of decades of practice. A photograph is static and occludes the many hints of its creation. A video camera, capturing multiple views, makes the viewer privy to another layer of truth: an image is a plane that results from its condition of capture — the confluence of subject, color, light and the will of the creator.

How does the image leave the film?

An Other Place then spills into the exhibition space itself. Displacement_31 and Displacement_32 (both 2024) are silver gelatin prints, hand-colored by the artist and set in thick, colored ceramic frames. They hang on a free-standing wall whose swath of tiles projects from its edge onto the floor. In these small scenographic displays, the reality depicted within the two abstract works escapes its frame, ready to test the audience's reaction to being engulfed by color.

Where two planes meet and high-contrast tones confront one another, the presentation turns almost clinical — a science of perceived color that recalls the charts an ophthalmologist uses to screen for sight deficiencies. Vision, the show quietly insists, is a physical response of the body: fleeting, and an ever-changing process of cognitive synthesis. In the dayglow colors and clashing hues, that somatic capacity sharpens.

The artist leverages this interplay of light and subject to trigger not just a physiological reaction but an emotional one. In another room, the series "Falling" (2026) — black-and-white lithographs on cotton paper mounted along the circumference of the space — captures people falling into water, their tumbling heads, limbs and garments creating a vertiginous maelstrom of bodies. Upright transparent panels covered in dichroic film break any clear procession through the room. Depending on the angle and the light, they reflect the viewer's surroundings in sunset orange while filtering the image behind them into bright cyan.

The result is a kaleidoscope of refracted images that overlap, obstruct and elude. It becomes difficult to locate the source of the figure in view. Despite the old adage that "seeing is believing," a simple optical trick calls all of that into question. Shahbazi extracts and manipulates the elemental parts of a composition, creating a mirage that challenges the image as an objective medium.

What does Li Tavor contribute?

Tavor, a longtime friend and collaborator of Shahbazi, responds with towering latex sheets (all 2026) that hang from the ceiling, forming oblique angles that discourage any direct walk through the geometric cells of the exhibition space. The curtains have a distinctly seductive, fleshy quality — irregularities, drips, thin sections through which light penetrates — and are dyed in Shahbazi's purples, magentas, blacks and other hues.

Where the latex drips and forms globules, it recalls the early processes by which film stock was developed: sensitive media, dark rooms, carefully timed chemical baths. Hung in a museum in dialogue with Shahbazi's framed photographs, the material foregrounds a question: what constitutes a photo, or more philosophically, what constitutes an image?

Born from color and material rather than a recognizable subject, Tavor's latex sheets share a kindred line of development with Shahbazi's photographic works. Both subvert the privileging of capture and result, favoring attention to the intricacies of technical formation. In this transposition of Shahbazi's aesthetic sensibility into a material beyond the film-based image, the exhibition pushes the audience to confront how we validate and conceive of an image.

"All at Once" thus becomes a laboratory in which the image is carefully dissected into its elemental parts and put on display. As color and shape appear in different amalgamations — dripping latex, refraction, 16mm projection — Shahbazi underscores the cognitive and psychic power of color, and points toward a practice increasingly willing to test photography's boundaries in physical space.