Through twenty-two years of art practice I have
learned that photography is part myth, part reality, part fiction,
part truth. But how to explore this rich paradox within my own
art? This was the dilemma that motivated me to conceive of the
Tales Left Untold (2000) series. I had already investigated
issues of identity in earlier work, but I was coming to see
that the way the photograph makes and breaks identities within
the image itself is entirely another matter. The struggle, then,
is to make photographs that comment on the very nature and culture
of photography.
In this paradoxical and irreverent spirit, I dressed
up in a traditional Persian outfit and explored hiding places.
After traveling in the West of the United States, I found the
recreated Mormon Pioneer town in Salt Lake City to be an ideal
setting for exploring identity, playing roles, being known and
unknown, telling and withholding. I never reveal all of me,
nor all of the scene. In most of this photographic series, actually,
only part of a feature or scene is shown, so as to allow more
space for interpretation by showing less. Just as I have had
to pick up the pieces of my identity along the way, so too,
must the viewers of my exhibition turn the photographs into
tales which make sense to them. My aim was to invite people
to come and see this real and unreal world, this theater of
identities. I tore the edges of all the photographs. I tore
away at the straight documentary tradition of having to keep
everything straight. I tore them to look like torn memories,
torn identitiesbits and pieces wanting to be whole. Tattered
tales defy straight paths. Not to become larger straight angles,
but to take on shapes not yet identified. Ultimately the tales
are ways of a new North American, a Middle Eastern-North American
woman trying to write her own myths within the older myths of
North America.
In my subsequent series, I Am Not A Persian
Carpet (2001), I challenge the ways that cultures have been
reduced to commodities. Based on my observations in Europe and
North America, it is not an exaggeration to say that in the
West, the only thing known about Persian culture may very well
be its carpets. In the United States specifically, all products
from Iran were banned, the most lucrative onesand,
therefore, the most forbiddenbeing Persian carpets
and caviar.
I printed my body with black ink from wooden printing
blocks that have many of the motifs used in Persian carpets.
At times it is difficult to tell where the real
carpet on my floor ends and the human carpet begins.
However, the full female body or self is never shown, only fragments.
At the same time that I embody the stereotype, I challenge it
by being disembodied, as each photograph shows bits and
pieces of a female identity that defies neat categorization.
There are hints and clues to a particular identity, but they
are neither definite nor complete.
Through this series I hope to facilitate an encounter
that will lead viewers to think deeply about the ways the Middle
East has been stereotyped, where people have been turned into
objects and categories. My photographs explore these issues
in and of themselves, but also provide the space for others
to debate them. At the same time that I am Not a Persian
Carpet is a protest, it also serves as an invitation to
ask difficult but necessary questions.
In my series, I Am Not a Persian Painting,
I perform in the photograph, pondering where my place is as
an Iranian Greek American woman photographer in the history
of the predominantly male tradition of Persian painting. In
the end, I am both subject and object of my own composition,
writing my own story against the backdrop of Iranian and American
art.
My photographic performance series, Super East-West
Woman (2002-ongoing) is motivated by a strategy of using
humor and my own body for political and cultural critique. The
idea started to take shape in 2002 after President George W.
Bush branded Iran as one of the three nations comprising an
axis of evil. It re-minded me of when I was nine
years old and escaped with my family during the Islamic revolution
in 1978-79. Irans new leaders labeled the United States
as the country of the Great Satan. Growing up in
the USA, I was destined to critique the two nations and cultures
that inhabit my identity and who are so bent on vilifying each
other. As an Iranian American, the demonization of the Other
becomes a daily negation of the Self. At once you are depicted
evil by the political propaganda of both ends of your identity:
doubly evil, double negative, negating each other so that in
the end you are good, because the evil cancels each other out.
So I took my chador (Farsi for Islamic
covering) and turned it into a cape. The Superman figure
of popular Western culture is transformed into a Superwoman
whose chador turns into a cape of agency. She pokes fun at herself,
her two cultures, and the ludicrous situations in which her
life, between East and West, has placed her. Cultural displacement
has not left her incapacitated; rather, it has given her the
capacity to live out her healing vision. Armored with her Persian
amulets and Greek anti-evil eye bracelets, Super East-West Woman
hopes to chase away the evil for which each nation blames the
other.
Super East-West Woman allows her audience
to have a good laugh with her-- to invite and create
an opening for conversation in the way that strong humor can
do and take the dialogue to an inter-cultural and inter-national
level.
In my series, She Speaks Greek Farsi (2009),
my abdomen serves as the site of language. An expression in
Greek, to speak any language in a Farsi way, is
a comment on how fluent and well someone speaks that language.
So to speak Greek Farsi or English Farsi
is to speak Greek or English well. By implication and inspiration,
if such a compliment exists today (despite the ancient history
of war between the Greeks and the Persians), then other similar
signs of respect between antagonistic nations might be possible.
From the concrete world of my embodied experience,
language is abstracted. At once personal and universal, private
and public, I write words on my skin from the flesh of my own
tri-cultural heritage. Words whose meanings, however, hold great
potency for anyone who has had to relocate and emigrate: family,
place, language, love, friend, birth, land, home, person, history,
life, memory, body, self, and world.
My own skin is the surface paper on which my art
is born. Imagine love written on a womb like the stretch marks
from giving birth. Words turn into marks of labor in the creative
act. I write in what was my childhoods handwriting on
my skin, performing language. The Greek and Farsi words come
from opposite directions, but meet in the middle, creating a
calligraphy that travels somewhere between private graffiti
and public tattoo. Against the backdrop of the political tensions
between Iran and the United States, my work stands as an alternative
interaction between differing cultures to the usual domination
or demonization.
My next series was Super East-West Womans
Sufi Dance: Egypt (2010). Beginning on Christmas day, December
25, 2010, Super East-West Woman performed a Sufi dance for peace
in Egypt. Spinning round and round in a dance for union and
love in front of mosques and churches in Cairo, on the Nile,
on rooftops of expanding New Cairo and at the foot of the Sphinx
and pyramids in Giza, Super East-West Woman invites others to
imagine a 'third space' of working, contesting and reconstructing,
allowing other positions to emerge--a space of trans-national
and cross-cultural initiations. Both the revolution in Egypt
and the increased sanctions by the UN against Irans nuclear
program, make Super East-West Womans Sufi Dance
both timely and necessary.
In my series, Super East-West Woman: Forty
Pillars (2011), I performed as a pillar, marking each of
my forty years of life. Like the sculpted female figures, the
Caryatids, of the Acropolis Erechtheion in Athens (421-407
BC), Super East-West Woman is both the literal column and the
metaphorical support, carrying the weight of her Greek and Iranian
heritage on her head: a history of both war and peace. In each
of the ten photographs of the installation, my veiled back is
linked to the reflection of my face in the glass of the retired
Tramway cabins of my permanent home in the United States. These
cabins have been replaced by new ones that are busy taking passengers
back and forth on cables suspended in air from Manhattan to
Roosevelt Island in New York City. The 20 instances of Super
East-West Woman in the photographs are reflected in mirrors,
creating 40 representations of her. The installation re-enacts
the architecture of the Chehel Sotun (Forty Columns in
Farsi, 1664 AD) palace of my native city Isfahan, Iran, where
20 actual columns meet 20 reflected columns in a pool of water
in front of the palace, creating 40 columns in the imagination
and giving it its name. After thirty years of taking me back
and forth since I relocated from Iran as a ten year-old, the
Tramway has become my portable Chehel Sotun, the exiled palace
of a nomad.
Super East-West Woman performs as a modern Caryatid
supporting a Chehel Sotun in the air, carrying the political
histories of war and peace of her three identities. Just as
her chador (Islamic veil in Farsi) turned into a cape,
allowing her to fly in earlier series, Super East-West Woman
transcends being a stationary column into a ferry-woman who
takes her passengers back and forth, between East and West.
The installation invites a space for re-imagining our conceptions
of passive and active, past and present, real and unreal, life
and art, presentation and re-presentation, personal and public
history, and relations between Iran and the USA.
In my series, I Am Not a Miniature (2013),
I take on the exclusively male artistic tradition of miniature
painting, by performing it and including my own story. The marks
on the artist's skin form a canvas interwoven with the marks
of the projected painting, where miniature becomes monumental
and personal becomes political, bridging the histories of once
enemy empires-- Persian, Greek and Ottoman. From the flesh of
my own bicultural heritage, the photographs travel somewhere
between private graffiti and public tattoo. My abdomen serves
as the site of the intersections of competing cultures and politics,
where Alexander the Great is depicted in Persian miniatures,
or Adam and Eve are depicted in an Ottoman one, or a miniature
begun in Shiraz is then completed in Istanbul.
My latest work: The Blind Owl Meets the Hunger
Artist (2014-present) is an ongoing series of ink drawings
where I imagine an invented encounter between the protagonist
of Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat's novella The Blind Owl
and the protagonist of Czech writer Franz Kafka's short story,
"The Hunger Artist." Metaphors, allegories, and themes
are explored of the artists in voluntary exile, the nature of
performance art, the real and the ideal, rituals of insanity,
the existential crises of the artists and their autobiographical
narratives. Curator, Negin Sharifzadeh had been following my
work for several years and invited me to participate in a group
show in September 2014 in Soho. I hung the drawings on a wall
in an installation partially concealed by a hospital privacy
screen and a doctors stool, bringing the viewer and the
work into an institutional relationship of clinical scrutiny.
It is in the process of my art that I dislocate
and relocate my place between the Iran and the United States.
Each exhibition or installation provides a material reference
for me after having left my first relatives, friends, home,
language and culture. Each series places a foundation stone
into a new home that I am building away from home, but always
in critical dialogue with the memory of that first home. To
be unhomed, as cultural studies theorist Homi Bhabha
puts it, does not mean that I am homeless. Nor does
it mean that I can be accommodated easily. By occupying two
places at once, a cultural hybrid becomes difficult to place.
It is within this third space of working, contesting
and reconstructing that the hybrid cultural identity creates
an opening for other positions to emergea space of transnational
and cross-cultural initiations.
Homeling was my Greek grandmother Efigenias
pronunciation for homeless. Neither homeless nor at home, homeling
captures both the horror and the rapture, in relocating home
and world.
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