In Seven Stones, Shadi Ghadirian replaces the sudden violence of war with its geological counterpart: a weight that does not explode but endures. These massive rocks, each seemingly immovable, absurd, ancient, occupy the intimate interiors of everyday Iranian life. They do not threaten. They simply are. Like memory. Like grief. Like fate.

Each photograph in the series is a scene of domestic entrapment, made uncanny by the presence of a boulder lodged without ceremony into kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms. The stone doesn’t break through; it dwells, carved into the silence like a lodger no one invited, no one can evict. It is the aftermath of something unspoken. The embodiment of what refuses to move on.

Where Nil, Nil dissected the intrusion of war into the feminine and the ordinary, Seven Stones meditates on the impossibility of healing. The war is no longer recent. It is sediment. It has lost its fire and found form. It does not speak but alters everything.

The stone becomes metaphor, yes, but it also resists metaphor. It is simply present. A barrier. A mass. A silence given texture. In some images it isolates; in others, it displaces. Always, it dwarfs. Its weight redefines what the figures around it can do, say, become.

Ghadirian stages these moments with an eerie serenity: no chaos, no confrontation, just resignation. The characters do not scream. They cook, sit, sleep, remember. And the stone, like trauma itself, does not recede. It makes itself at home.

If Nil, Nil was the scream folded into still life, Seven Stones is its echo: a quiet, unresolved geology of sorrow, political paralysis, and personal burden. Together, they form a diptych of quiet devastation: one loud in its silence, the other silent in its volume.

Both, Nil, Nil and Seven Stones clearly become metaphors for the consequences of any war.