You are given a wish. What do you wish for?

In the performance CASH HYPNOSIS, Farvash creates a spiritual laboratory composed of fragments of memory in the form of objects, scents, light, and events from a specific visit to Imamzadeh Saleh in central Tehran sometime in 1987 — a wishing well, coins, prayer, rosewater, rapeseed oil, and saffron. Here, preparations take place for an encounter with the supernatural. A process of purification and an ongoing search.

24 visitors had the opportunity to enter the work, throw a gold coin, and leave a wish.

— Lilith Performance Studio, 2021

Written on Farvash’s hand is: Do you want to make a wish? To read it, a visitor has to come close. Once they have read the question, Farvash silently offers them a gold-plated silver coin. One side is inscribed in Farsi with with God, the other without God.

The laboratory grew from material research Farvash had been conducting at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden. The research began with experiments around saffron and fluorescence and led to working with turmeric and its fluorescent properties. In Cash Hypnosis, the chemical research is brought into the performance and continues in real time.

Farvash extracts fluorescent curcumin from turmeric using alcohol and mixes it with rosewater to make an elixir. The rosewater carries the remembered smell of the shrine.

The laboratory moves between chemical experiment and alchemical proposition. The elixir is materially produced, but it also belongs to the ritual conditions of the work.

Before each new encounter, Farvash fills a vessel with the elixir and washes their body. If a visitor accepts the coin, they remove their shoes. Farvash takes their hand and leads them up the stairs, where they make a wish and throw the coin through an opening in the fabric.

Farvash then returns to the laboratory, fills the liquid, washes again, and waits for the next person.

The sound, created by Hans Appelqvist, begins with an Islamic ceremonial sound that is altered until its recognisable references disappear and it becomes a tone.