Echos of Iran | Sepideh Eghtedari
May 10, 2024
Hajar Moradi, Interwoven, 2018, Gabbeh weaving | image: Jean-Michael Seminaro
Inertia is an enduring force of suspension possessing a quiet strength and a silent resistance that withstands the ceaseless movement of time. It is a force that holds us in our movement in the boundless infinity of moments. Artist Rojin Shafiei channels this suspension – this resistance and surrender – in her art practice. Her work J’attends le temps (2018) is a mesmerizing video installation featured in the group exhibition Echos of Iran: A WomXn’s Tribute at Duran Mashaal Gallery, which ran from October 5 – November 4, 2023. The piece is made of three white pedestals, each supporting a black and silver metallic clock perpetually set to 12 o'clock. The clocks are tethered to three screens on the gallery's wall by supple black straps. The screens play in a hypnotic loop, featuring a figure whose long, coal-black hair drapes onto a flowing dark gown. Her hands, reddened with cold, are tied behind her back by what we imagine are the same black straps as in the gallery. On the lefthand screen, she recedes from the viewer, while she moves toward us on the right: the “anonymous protagonist” embarks on a ceaseless, circling journey through a bleak winter landscape, devoid of any discernible destination. A profound sense of temporal suspension is evoked by the figure dragging the unbearable lightness of three identical clocks, which comb across the frozen ground on the centre screen. In front of this piece I, as spectator, glimpse the past, present, and future converging in an exploration of the interplay between the stoppage of time and inertia.
Rojin Shafiei, J'attends le temps, 2018, mixed media | image: Jean-Michael Seminaro
Echos of Iran: A WomXn’s Tribute, co-curated by Duran Mashaal with Shadan Saber, features the works of six Iranian-Canadian womXn artists whose ties to their homeland are prominent in their practices. Despite employing a wide range of media, these six artists conjure and share an approach toward resilience. In their practice, they speak of something otherwise hidden; they reveal the unseen strength of womXn in the Iranian diaspora. The multidisciplinary artist Anahita Norouzi explores displacement, identity, and memory through the fragility and endurance of plants. In her hands, botanicals become glass sculptures, digital images, painted silhouettes or printed stamps. These plants are left behind in her homeland, yet their memories are displaced with the artist and transformed into an allusive strength. This growing strength quietly moves across Norouzi’s plants to Maryam Izadifard’s intimate oil paintings of domestic spaces. Izadifard explores private feminine conditions through everyday objects: a towel, a sewing machine, or a hygiene pad. She examines domestic life and a sense of open narrative in works such as L’écho des muets (2023), where a bath towel hangs to dry at the top of an open door.
Anahita Norouzi, works from the series Displaced Garden and From the Other Side, 2000–01, cyanotype, blown glass, and metal | image: Jean-Michael Seminaro
Maryam Izadifard, L'écart embrassé (left) and L'écho des muets (right), 2023, oil on canvas | image: Jean-Michael Seminaro
Hajar Moradi, on the other hand, turns our attention to the anonymous so-called gatekeepers of the domestic themselves: womXn. They do so in Interwoven (2023) through weaving a Persian rug, a Gabbeh, with wool thread on a wooden loom adorned with black Indian-ink figures of womXn’s faces and flowing hair. Knot over knot, the Persian rug is woven: a task traditionally associated with womXn as both a household chore and a significant source of family income. At the top of the rug, dead-center, an open eye with a black iris and a kaleidoscopic pupil looks out, representing an awakening of this domestic art form and a warding off of ill will.
Anahita Akhavan, Burgeoning I, 2023, oil on linen | image: courtesy of the artist
While Moradi displays the act of weaving itself, another artist, Anahita Akhavan, employs the motifs on Persian rugs as signifiers and ornamentation in her painted abstractions, such as Bourgeoning I and Bourgeoning II (2023). These are the same motifs used in Islamic art and architecture to adorn towers, domes, walls, and the sacred elements of mosques. In the foreground, they form a floating lattice that stands out – bold and graphic – in front of a hazy seascape or dreamscape beyond, speaking to the interstice between being and belonging.
Izadifard, Moradi, and Akhavan’s voices, echoing in private and revered rooms carry into the public sphere in Naz Rahbar’s black and white drawings. Rahbar draws miniature figures rendered delicately in black ink. In A Forest (2017–22), a crowd of people come together and test the borders and limits of embodiment. This is where the murmuring holds power, like an impenetrable forest strongly rooted in the fusion of resistance and surrender.
Naz Rahbar, don't wake her, slip out quietly (left), 2019, and A Forest (right), 2017–22, ink on paper | image: Jean-Michael Seminaro
Anahita Norouzi’s fragile glass-blown and cyanotype plants, Maryam Izadifard’s serenely tranquil paintings of domestic spaces, Hajar Moradi’s textile installation of the traditionally woven Persian rug, Anahita Akhavan’s geometrical abstract paintings, and Naz Rahbar’s massive ink drawings of miniature figures, all speak of an X factor hidden in concepts traditionally known as the “feminine.” The X is resilience, a durability that perpetuates in the solid immobility of the clock’s hands, as in the toil of the receding and reappearing figure in Rojin Shafiei’s J’attends le temps. While it might appear steel in one’s memory, the X factor is striving outside the viewer’s sphere. It roots, evolves, transforms, unfolds, and takes shape in silence, while it keeps murmuring in both the private and public domains. It is at times unseen yet continuous. It is presumed unspoken yet speaks of continuance; it is a womXn’s tribute.
Sepideh Eghtedari is an Iranian writer, editor, and designer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her Master’s research in Art History considers contemporary Indigenous art and decolonization in the age of digital technologies.
The exhibition Echos of Iran: A WomXn’s Tribute ran from October 5 – November 4, 2023, at Duran Mashaal Gallery, in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.
