In Nil, Nil, Shadi Ghadirian composes a still life elegy to the domestication of war. Her photographs are precision acts: each a tableau vivant of contradiction, where the tools of intimacy and destruction coexist in claustrophobic peace. A grenade rests among fruit. Ammunition mingles with pearls, lipstick, and prayer beads. A gas mask peers from a toy shelf. Bullets are tucked neatly into a handbag like lipstick tubes. A vacuum cleaner wears a soldier’s satchel like a second skin.

Here, war is not a spectacle fought at the edges of society; it is folded into the routines of daily life, hidden in drawers, behind curtains, under pillows. It lingers in the softness of childhood, the quiet rituals of femininity, the sterile glow of refrigerators and washing machines. Even in repose, its silhouette looms.

The series' title, Nil, Nil, suggests a scoreless draw, an unresolved standoff. But the zero is also an erasure, a refusal to speak plainly, to name the violence, even as it encroaches on the most private spaces. Ghadirian does not offer explosions, carnage, or smoke. She offers silence. The kind of silence that seeps into daily life when conflict becomes routine, when the soldier comes home and never quite leaves.

Every object is familiar, yet made uncanny by proximity to its opposite. The photographs operate like warnings, but also as records, of the invisible weight war places on those not at the frontlines, and of the quiet, gendered labor of enduring. The feminine and the militarized are not in opposition here; they are superimposed, forced to share space in a world that makes no room for innocence.

Ghadirian, ever meticulous, never moralizes. She reveals. She sets the trap, invites the gaze, and lets the viewer reckon with what should never have been allowed to look so natural.