The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

170 Shirana Shahbazi creates images that are at once ordinary and beautiful. She has been described as an ‘ambassadress of the unspectacular’, yet her carefully staged photographic and painted tableaux are, by definition, dramatic. Her subjects are laden with art historical references and resonate with today’s image-saturated world but, in exchange for drawing attention to the ways these subjects have been represented and reproduced, Shahbazi ‘manages to render their symbolic meanings equivalent’. 1 In her contemporary reinterpretations of the still-life genre, the artist traverses geography, history and media to posit questions of translation and displacement. Born in Tehran in 1974, Shahbazi immigrated to Germany as an 11 year old and now lives in Zurich. As an artist, her work is not marked by exile, nor by nostalgic displacement, but is instead distinguished by a tremendous ease with location. This sense of effortless transit is evident in her monumental work for APT6: an installation of still-life images, which mixes and deconstructs an array of seemingly disparate referents. In an altogether fracturing experience, glossy prints of varying size and composition are arranged in simple constellations across the wall, while monumental paintings at either end serve as quotation marks around this two-dimensional act of speech. Shahbazi’s work inhabits a zone of non-specificity that defies easy categorisation. Her lush imagery exploits iconographic and compositional elements of seventeenth-century nature morte , where the fleeting beauty of a blooming flower, for example, acts as a reminder that life is short. Yet, her glorious fruits, flowers and birds also reference tazhib a tashiri , a variant of the Persian miniature that incorporated borrowings from China during the Kajar dynasty (1794–1925). 2 While recalling painterly traditions from both the Middle East and Europe, in their sharp, vivid colours, these photographs also reference the stock pictures used to illustrate glossy advertising brochures. In another gesture that speaks to the hyper-real language of advertising, Shahbazi has commissioned a group of Iranian billboard painters to translate her precise studio photographs onto black- painted canvas. These paintings employ the reductive style typically used in advertising or to celebrate religious leaders in Iran today; the handling of the paint is brushy and viewed to best advantage from a distance. The dark backgrounds cultivate a funereal aura, while the luminosity of the perishable blooms, fruit and skulls conjures vanitas themes familiar from seventeenth-century Flemish painting. If, as Roland Barthes wrote of that era’s guild portraits, ‘Depth is born only at the moment the spectacle itself turns its shadow towards man and begins to look at him’, here, that depth seems to ‘rise out of the past and the multiple layers of mediation [are] uncannily reanimated’. 3 The basket of fruit and blooms in one painting is saved from glossy blankness by incongruous elements nestled around its edges: Shirana Shahbazi A purely visual language improbably glowing chrysanthemums, small pieces of sculptural coral and strings of incandescent pearls. Jewellery suggests a human presence, albeit an absent one, as does the trio of cheery skulls in the second painting. Their glaring white domes hover atop a black ground, keeping empty-eyed watch over gallery visitors. The gap- toothed grimace may appear as a perversion of the grins of toothpaste commercials, though these paintings aren’t selling anything. Ultimately, the images Shahbazi produces and reproduces function as ‘placeholders’ — they are generic rather than specific. The artist takes a bowerbird approach to image-making, and seamlessly intermingles visual cues. While Shahbazi’s works mine these representational conventions, they are not meant to act as citations. Each picture prompts you to catch yourself in the act of looking. By playing with ‘types’, the artist simultaneously celebrates and exposes the clichés that cling to them. The overwhelming effect, then, is decentring. By arranging still-life compositions to combine distance with proximity, the artist strips away specificity and opens up a space of imagination. Irregular groupings and juxtapositions create meanings that break apart and then reform — like chapters in a book read from front to back, or back to front, or indeed from any page. The effect recalls Faraj Bou al-Isha’s 2003 poem Wait : ‘do not leave yet. / Let me rearrange the world / for you’. 4 This is a nowhere place, but it is also everywhere. Bree Richards Endnotes 1 Christy Lange, ‘I am an image’, Frieze , no.113, March 2008, p.124. 2 Kate Bush, ‘Introduction’, in Meanwhile: Shirana Shahbazi [exhibition catalogue], Swiss Institute, New York; Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2007, p.6. 3 Kristin M Jones ‘Chronicles of the everyday: Photographs, paintings, collectives and cultural identity’, Frieze , no.90, April 2005, p.94. 4 Quoted in Cherry Smith, ‘Shirana Shahbazi’, Art Monthly , no.294, March 2006, p.32.