Alphabet, 2010

exhibition history —> Sometimes Y, Al Green Gallery, Toronto 2011. Remote homecoming Studio Strike, London. UK 2011.  I Will Never Be The Same, Videocube, Contemporary Istanbul, Turkey, 2010.

The viewer finds herself or himself in front of a two-panel video in which two pencils start to print out two alphabets, one in English, from left to right, and the other in Farsi, from right to left. I used a 5B drawing pencil, sharpened by a knife, instead of a regular H pencil and followed my handwriting with a camera while I was writing the alphabets on a textured watercolor paper. A dense and textured sound floats along with the hand movements. The sound of each pencil in motion combines and seems to form from the mixture of the English and Farsi written alphabets.

Alphabet is about amalgamation or meeting of two distinct poles, where a state of in-between-ness arises. Having both Farsi and English, I made two languages move towards each other to highlighted the fact that they never blend and maintain their borders. I noticed the differences in the way I write my O’s and my I’s. My English speaking/writing friends begin their O’s at the top and they put the vertical before their horizontal bars when they write “I”, where I do the opposite or a different way. These differences became evident in the viewing of my own work when I stepped back to review it. In the same way differences between lighting became obvious. The two shots were done at the same time, same day, on the same surface and with the same pencil.  The natural lighting changed all of a sudden and made the Farsi environment look warmer and lighter. I am more comfortable speaking and writing in Farsi so I decided to believe in my intuition and use this timely consequence to reveal my point of view. Parallel with my displacement from a continent to another ‘coincidently’ I changed the medium in my artistic practice from paintings and drawings to time-based ones. It seems like I cannot put my drawing pencils and watercolor papers away in the same way that I want to hold on to my first language, Farsi.

 

 

 

 

 

2 years ago 

Aleph, 2009

exhibition history —> Iran via Video Current, Thomas Erben Gallery, NY, Dec 2011. AGH World Film festival, Hamilton 2010. Gallery1313, Toronto February 2009. Limited Access II, Tehran October 2009.

“Aleph, no. 1, is the unthinkable life-death, abstract principle of all that is and all that is not.” Carlo Suares,

 “Thinking a lot about Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), I realized that one of the things it is about is minimizing the subject, indicating that the removal of one subject can allow for the appearance of another.” Vincent Katz 

 

 Aleph is the first letter of Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi alphabet.  It is believed to be the symbol and spiritual root of all harmony, beginning of life and thought.  

 “Aleph” is an allusion to an abstract and dysfunctional alphabet, which never gets the chance to appear on paper, and is demolished from the very beginning of its birth. The performative act of erasing amplifies “Aleph” with a paradoxical characteristic of creation and destruction. There is mourning for the deceased (the artist’s cultural and artistic background), while at the same time there is delight for the newborn.

 In this piece of work I am destroying Aleph, my handwriting, my drawing, and my art in an attempt to recreate. My hand experiences a duality, living in a western culture. Although it is used to getting erased in a restricted political atmosphere in Iran, it exposes a self-defeating behavior; a dichotomy, when it writes right to left while at the same time it erases left to right. 

 Repeatedly erasing the pre-existing and making a path through the unknown, with an awareness of being under the gaze of the remains, I name it Aleph, the beginning and the end.

 

Sona Safaei-Sooreh

2 years ago  1 note

Chalk House, Video Installation, Sept 2010

Exhibition history—> Limited access III, Remote homecoming Studio Strike, London. UK 2011, Mohsen Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran.

     I used chalk to draw an illusion of a house on the ground as I used to do when I was a child to play with my brother. It was my house and nobody was allowed to cross the borders without permission. I took a picture of my imaginary house and projected it on a brick wall. Then I filmed a crowd of people entering and exiting the borders of this projected chalk house.  Slowly they push each other, to maintain their space, their ownership; but the owner of this house is ever changing.

2 years ago  1 note

Postproduction, 2009

“In Postproduction we find the confused observer; the artist who gets buried under a mass of appropriated art, until one loses sight of her. The artist falls into the stream of mass-produced art, which is escalated by the art world’s and this era’s struggle to keep up with the speed of production in this mechanized society.

The character in the movie walks around slowly and retrospectively considers the artworks from past and present time around her; while thinking about her distinctive role in this machine assembled, recycled, and appropriated art world.

Machines increasingly blot out human labor from everyday life, providing them with more and expeditiously produced products. Having played her part, the artist as a human being gets obscured by the continued appearance of other artist’s artworks which are made of either recycled materials or pre-existing concepts, in the room.

At the end one finds a room filled with a mass of thoughts and pieces that are combined in to a single artwork, emphasizing the role played by the network of selves we call society in contemporary art. In other words, the artist gives away her self to an integral of selves becoming one with them. 

 

Sona Safaei

2 years ago 

Alphabet, 2010

exhibition history —> Sometimes Y, Al Green Gallery, Toronto 2011. Remote homecoming Studio Strike, London. UK 2011.  I Will Never Be The Same, Videocube, Contemporary Istanbul, Turkey, 2010.

The viewer finds herself or himself in front of a two-panel video in which two pencils start to print out two alphabets, one in English, from left to right, and the other in Farsi, from right to left. I used a 5B drawing pencil, sharpened by a knife, instead of a regular H pencil and followed my handwriting with a camera while I was writing the alphabets on a textured watercolor paper. A dense and textured sound floats along with the hand movements. The sound of each pencil in motion combines and seems to form from the mixture of the English and Farsi written alphabets.

Alphabet is about amalgamation or meeting of two distinct poles, where a state of in-between-ness arises. Having both Farsi and English, I made two languages move towards each other to highlighted the fact that they never blend and maintain their borders. I noticed the differences in the way I write my O’s and my I’s. My English speaking/writing friends begin their O’s at the top and they put the vertical before their horizontal bars when they write “I”, where I do the opposite or a different way. These differences became evident in the viewing of my own work when I stepped back to review it. In the same way differences between lighting became obvious. The two shots were done at the same time, same day, on the same surface and with the same pencil.  The natural lighting changed all of a sudden and made the Farsi environment look warmer and lighter. I am more comfortable speaking and writing in Farsi so I decided to believe in my intuition and use this timely consequence to reveal my point of view. Parallel with my displacement from a continent to another ‘coincidently’ I changed the medium in my artistic practice from paintings and drawings to time-based ones. It seems like I cannot put my drawing pencils and watercolor papers away in the same way that I want to hold on to my first language, Farsi.

 

 

 

 

 

Aleph, 2009

exhibition history —> Iran via Video Current, Thomas Erben Gallery, NY, Dec 2011. AGH World Film festival, Hamilton 2010. Gallery1313, Toronto February 2009. Limited Access II, Tehran October 2009.

“Aleph, no. 1, is the unthinkable life-death, abstract principle of all that is and all that is not.” Carlo Suares,

 “Thinking a lot about Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), I realized that one of the things it is about is minimizing the subject, indicating that the removal of one subject can allow for the appearance of another.” Vincent Katz 

 

 Aleph is the first letter of Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi alphabet.  It is believed to be the symbol and spiritual root of all harmony, beginning of life and thought.  

 “Aleph” is an allusion to an abstract and dysfunctional alphabet, which never gets the chance to appear on paper, and is demolished from the very beginning of its birth. The performative act of erasing amplifies “Aleph” with a paradoxical characteristic of creation and destruction. There is mourning for the deceased (the artist’s cultural and artistic background), while at the same time there is delight for the newborn.

 In this piece of work I am destroying Aleph, my handwriting, my drawing, and my art in an attempt to recreate. My hand experiences a duality, living in a western culture. Although it is used to getting erased in a restricted political atmosphere in Iran, it exposes a self-defeating behavior; a dichotomy, when it writes right to left while at the same time it erases left to right. 

 Repeatedly erasing the pre-existing and making a path through the unknown, with an awareness of being under the gaze of the remains, I name it Aleph, the beginning and the end.

 

Sona Safaei-Sooreh

Chalk House, Video Installation, Sept 2010

Exhibition history—> Limited access III, Remote homecoming Studio Strike, London. UK 2011, Mohsen Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran.

     I used chalk to draw an illusion of a house on the ground as I used to do when I was a child to play with my brother. It was my house and nobody was allowed to cross the borders without permission. I took a picture of my imaginary house and projected it on a brick wall. Then I filmed a crowd of people entering and exiting the borders of this projected chalk house.  Slowly they push each other, to maintain their space, their ownership; but the owner of this house is ever changing.

Postproduction, 2009

“In Postproduction we find the confused observer; the artist who gets buried under a mass of appropriated art, until one loses sight of her. The artist falls into the stream of mass-produced art, which is escalated by the art world’s and this era’s struggle to keep up with the speed of production in this mechanized society.

The character in the movie walks around slowly and retrospectively considers the artworks from past and present time around her; while thinking about her distinctive role in this machine assembled, recycled, and appropriated art world.

Machines increasingly blot out human labor from everyday life, providing them with more and expeditiously produced products. Having played her part, the artist as a human being gets obscured by the continued appearance of other artist’s artworks which are made of either recycled materials or pre-existing concepts, in the room.

At the end one finds a room filled with a mass of thoughts and pieces that are combined in to a single artwork, emphasizing the role played by the network of selves we call society in contemporary art. In other words, the artist gives away her self to an integral of selves becoming one with them. 

 

Sona Safaei

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