Shiranah Shahbazi “if, then.”
30 Aug - 11 Oct 2008
Shirana Shahbazi, From the Series Flowers, Fruits & Portraits, [Stilleben-19-2007], C-print on aluminium, Variable sizes, Ed. of 5 (+ 1 AP)
Courtesy Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich
Courtesy Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich
Shirana Shahbazi (born 1974 in Teheran) lives and works in Zurich. In the year 2002 the artist’s first (non-institutional) solo exhibition took place at the Galerie Bob van Orsouw. Since then, Shahbazi’s list of exhibitions has been expanded by significant cities and institutions. Solo exhibits in New York (Salon 94, Trans Area, The Wrong Gallery), at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, at the Bonn Kunstverein, as well as participation in important group exhibits including the 2002 Venice Biennale and the 2005 Prague Biennial add to the international reception of her many-faceted work. A current solo exhibition dedicated to the artist at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva (catalogue) can be seen up to May 29th.
In 2002 Shahbazi was awarded the highly esteemed Citigroup Privat Bank Photography Prize in London for her work cycle “Goftare Nik / Good Words”. Starting with the award-winning small- and large-sized colour photographs in this cycle, which she shot over several years in Iran, Shahbazi began to push the envelope of photography. With the intention of extending her artistic horizons to other media, she commissioned Iranian billboard artists to do huge (wall) paintings following her photographic models. In addition, in the sense of a continual crossover, Iranian rug makers have for some time now been hand-knotting carpets from the artist’s photographic designs.
Shahbazi has once been aptly named an “ambassadress of the unspectacular”. As such, in the course of the current debate on globalisation, she questions that an Iranian in exile must necessarily aim for a political or cultural discourse in her works. Though undoubtedly her collaboration with Iranian billboard painters and carpetmakers has developed from the artist’s origin, as has her view of a picture been nurtured by the tradition and aesthetics of Islamic culture. However – and here Shahbazi is not any different from western artists – this nurturing takes place via a culture’s proffered images that prefigure perception and provide identity. Thus far Shahbazi’s work can be read more as a visual discourse on the significance and suggestiveness of pictures in general than as an artistic attempt to point out cultural differences and thereby foster the polarization of the familiar and the alien.
The artist likes to speak of the “staged casualness” of her photographs. Thus the arbitrariness of the street scenes or portraits is only presumed, since most of them are just as stage-set as her strictly arranged still lifes, which incidentally seem more obliged to a Dutch than an Iranian pictorial tradition. Shahbazi has, namely, described how she needed a whole afternoon to set up a snapshot-like photo of a small family in a Teheran park, in order to address the patently different passers-by. All of which makes clear that the photographic act is not voyeuristic, but requires an involvement in a situation in which the artist is herself an actor.
The exhibition will show her most recent work blocks, which, among other places, were shot in the U.S. and in China. They stand for the stringent analysis of the social status of pictures, their function as projection screens for ideas and expectations, their instrumentalisation as guarantors of reality, their potential for mnemotechnics and their symbolic relevance. The photographs testify to a transcultural impetus, which must be the basis for making pictures in the east as well as in the west, in order to fulfil any claim of a universal validity.
Birgid Uccia
In 2002 Shahbazi was awarded the highly esteemed Citigroup Privat Bank Photography Prize in London for her work cycle “Goftare Nik / Good Words”. Starting with the award-winning small- and large-sized colour photographs in this cycle, which she shot over several years in Iran, Shahbazi began to push the envelope of photography. With the intention of extending her artistic horizons to other media, she commissioned Iranian billboard artists to do huge (wall) paintings following her photographic models. In addition, in the sense of a continual crossover, Iranian rug makers have for some time now been hand-knotting carpets from the artist’s photographic designs.
Shahbazi has once been aptly named an “ambassadress of the unspectacular”. As such, in the course of the current debate on globalisation, she questions that an Iranian in exile must necessarily aim for a political or cultural discourse in her works. Though undoubtedly her collaboration with Iranian billboard painters and carpetmakers has developed from the artist’s origin, as has her view of a picture been nurtured by the tradition and aesthetics of Islamic culture. However – and here Shahbazi is not any different from western artists – this nurturing takes place via a culture’s proffered images that prefigure perception and provide identity. Thus far Shahbazi’s work can be read more as a visual discourse on the significance and suggestiveness of pictures in general than as an artistic attempt to point out cultural differences and thereby foster the polarization of the familiar and the alien.
The artist likes to speak of the “staged casualness” of her photographs. Thus the arbitrariness of the street scenes or portraits is only presumed, since most of them are just as stage-set as her strictly arranged still lifes, which incidentally seem more obliged to a Dutch than an Iranian pictorial tradition. Shahbazi has, namely, described how she needed a whole afternoon to set up a snapshot-like photo of a small family in a Teheran park, in order to address the patently different passers-by. All of which makes clear that the photographic act is not voyeuristic, but requires an involvement in a situation in which the artist is herself an actor.
The exhibition will show her most recent work blocks, which, among other places, were shot in the U.S. and in China. They stand for the stringent analysis of the social status of pictures, their function as projection screens for ideas and expectations, their instrumentalisation as guarantors of reality, their potential for mnemotechnics and their symbolic relevance. The photographs testify to a transcultural impetus, which must be the basis for making pictures in the east as well as in the west, in order to fulfil any claim of a universal validity.
Birgid Uccia