The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

How did you come to your life as an artist? Looking back, I would say it was the shattering of illusions that followed the 1979 Iranian Revolution that led me to my life as an artist. Maybe at the beginning I was just looking for a way to escape from the fathomless disappointment and injury I felt. But in the years since then, art has opened a space for critical perception and reflection, not a place to hide. I started at the Academy of Arts at the University of Tehran almost five years after the revolution, and three years after that the fundamentalists brutally seized power. Dissenters were jailed, sought freedom in exile, or were condemned to silence. It was a harsh time. Like many of my generation, I was deeply disturbed and felt I had been deprived of the life I had hoped to lead. Even though the university was firmly under the control of the Islamists at this time, some students who did not conform with the regime initially sought out imagery with which they could express — in highly coded and often pathetic forms — the prevailing standstill our society was experiencing, as well as their suppressed longings. In this way, painting opened up a suitable framework between abstraction and the formation of metaphors. I belonged to this group of students. I left Iran in 1991 to study in Germany, and to escape the political and cultural boundaries of my country. The many years I have spent living and working in a European context have altered the way I am, the way I work and also how I see my home country. This view alternates between closeness and a sense of detachment, with new perspectives and understandings emerging from within these spaces of in-between. These spaces are where I locate myself as an artist. You make works in a variety of media — photographs, digital drawings, textiles, installations — combining references both traditional and modern, and often emphasising the surface of the ornament. What other themes, motifs and interests do you return to in your practice? What emerges again and again in my works is a tension between apparently harmless surfaces and what is actually represented by the content. I often offer the viewer an image, which is, at first glance, of an ornamentally beautiful and harmonised order, but, on closer inspection, it is precisely these soothing and clichéd images which are undermined. It is about the simultaneity of beauty and harm and the ambivalence of their coexistence. This is my way of simultaneously tempting and irritating the viewer, to encourage them to give up their distanced, ambivalent positions and rethink their presumptions — to recognise and respond to these contradictions and contrasting emotions. Your work in APT7 is an immersive installation, another in your ‘Written room’ series, where you cover the surfaces of gallery spaces with elegant lines of Farsi script. The swirling calligraphy variously records names, fragments of words and memories. Given the meaning of the text is fragmented in this context, obscure even to those familiar with the language, what effect do you hope this will have on your audience? Viewers entering Written room 1999–ongoing are surrounded by patterns made using an illegible language, which forces them to give up their sovereign and distanced viewpoint. I hope this will encourage them to question their perception of language, and their orientation to it. What might be understood initially as a loss of meaning, can instead be interpreted simply as abstract visual language — an environment that cultivates subjective experience. In Ways of Seeing 1972, John Berger said: ‘The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses what language for what purpose.’ This seems to resonate with your practice, which draws on an array of visual references from past and present and relates to the politics of visual representation. I hope that my practice resonates with Berger’s illuminating quote. Yet, in our time, where crises are rampant, finding and establishing the proper context is becoming increasingly complicated, which is not to say impossible. The field of intercultural communication is plagued with clichés and stock phrases, so each effort to engage in cross- cultural interaction is endangered by its own abuse. Each must balance fact and delusion. For me, as an artist, every place given to me to work seems to be accompanied by a feeling of displacement. Swaying between optimistic activism and cynical reservation, I am aware of the gaze that fixes me, and the projection that alienates me. As a result, in my work, I have tried to distil this conflict of displacement and transfer of meaning, turning it into a source of creativity. Do you see yourself as a political artist? I would say that I am a politically interested and dedicated person and, as an artist, I do explore politics in my work. But, I also see a fundamental difference between politics and art. I feel the former reflects a commitment to finding answers, while the latter enables an exploration of existential questions and doubts. Interviewed by Bree Richards, July 2012. PARASTOU FOROUHAR An interview 117