BURNING WINGS
A video Program of
Iranian Women Artists
Curated by Odile Burluraux
"Do not seal my lips with the padlock of silence For I have an untold story in my heart."
Rebellion In Côté femmes - d'un poème l'autre
In Iran, cinema and photography have given rise to numerous publications and artistic events, both abroad and in Iran. On the other hand, video has not really been the subject of specific in-depth studies, despite a few articles that have tried to give an account of the history of this medium and the way in which artists have appropriated it.
Read MoreIn recent years, the situation of artists has changed considerably - notably because of the conditions of production but also because of the socio-political context. The relationship to the moving image has been transformed by, among other things, the massive use of social networks, and their subversive power of political resistance in certain demonstrations held in public space.
Women artists living in Iran or in the diaspora use video to produce works that express the complexity of their relationship to the world reflecting a trend, observed in the past, of personal and intimate narratives that take on a more militant tone over time.
Women artists seek to record fragments of their thoughts, their memories, their feelings and their contradictions. They confront history, the evocation of exile, transgression, the question of relationships to power or to social and religious norms.
The works often have a committed character and are marked by a great sensitivity showing the relation between the visible and the invisible, the use of the poetic metaphor. They question the past, question the taboos, the traditions sometimes, they have a melancholic, provocative, funny, excessive aspect. They represent the body, whether it is vulnerable, hidden, deformed, transformed, censored, erased, silenced.
Fighters, they are determined to express their desire to exist, to support the silent but active protests to express their empowerment as artists.
WORKS
An Iranian woman who has lived in the Netherlands for 17 years dreams of her own piece of land in her native country. Together with her parents, she looks for a suitable location in Iran and finds a parcel of rocky, dry desert land. In her mind, she sees a green oasis emerge there. In her father's garden, she helps strike cuttings of cacti for her future yard. On the soundtrack, we hear the elated messages that she leaves on the answering machines of people back at home in the Netherlands. During the course of the film, however, her messages lose their enthusiasm: political developments are getting in the way of her dream.
Atousa Bandeh Ghiasabadi works with video/ film, drawings and painting. Her films find themselves on the border of fiction and documentary and examine different options of story telling (visually and verbally). In her long film The Day I disappeared, 62', 2011, she refers to her personal story of a crisis of identity as a result of immigration. Her works are stories delved in the ephemeral layers of her memories. Her images of objects and portraits conceal a profusion of symbolic associations. Rather than representing a plain narrative, Her works represent visual poetry.
Born in 1968 in Iran, lives in Amsterdam
"It's like taking bandage from a wound. It hurts to be yourself of your true self. Every so often. I am strong. I am not strong. I am strong. I am not strong. I want to be strong. I am afraid. I pretend. I preserve myself. Every so often. My skin is delicate. My skin is hard. So delicate that with the slightest scratch muscles and veins and blood pour out. As delicate as a balloon that is blown up. I pretend that I can take care of myself. Every so often... I am what I am. I choose. I decide. I choose my own masks. Although it might not appear so. But in a shameful way I am free. I am free. Even if I am not free I am my own prisoner. Prisoner of my own fears. Every so often. I fight with myself. I loathe myself. I run from myself. I teach myself. I run from me. I return to me. I release myself. Even if I am not Me. Every So often."
Eskandarfar's work over the years has been more focused on human relations and humans inner worlds. She is interested in creating portraits through her paintings, collages, videos and other mediums she uses. She participated in Abbas Kiarostami's film-making workshops in 2005. Her first feature film "Root Canal" was completed in 2013.
Born in 1980 in Tehran, lives in Tehran
Still is a short film about loss and denial, longing and trying to reconnectc through mundane means of communication.
Parisa Ghaderi is a visual artist, curator and filmmaker. She moved to the United States in 2009. In her work, she addresses the question of in-between through her personal situation, that feeling of "never having fully arrived and never having fully left". She deals with emotional and physical distance, compounded loss and the opacity of language. Using photography and video, she explores moments of pause that are filled with vulnerability, silence and contradiction.
Born in 1983 in Theran, lives in the USA
Several stories of exile are intertwined in this narration: a young woman Olka leaves Iran six months after the disappearance of her boyfriend in the demonstrations. Reza, a political refugee, who never returned to Iran, comes to pick her up at the airport. The film stages the story of the meeting of two generations, that of the young woman worried by the disappearance of a loved one in Tehran, and that of Reza who has lost his country of origin for twenty-four years. Parallel to this scene, a second story unfolds. Negar, a young Iranian transsexual prostitute tells his story when he wakes up in a hospital room, after the operation.
Elika Hedayat takes a critical and committed look at the political reality of her country. She questions the question of identity, origin, complexity and cultural schizophrenia existing in Iran or elsewhere. She fights against inequalities and censorship. She uses sarcasm and cynicism to mock the greed of men toward power. She creates a universe that balances the innocence of childhood against the violence of the world.
Born in 1979 in Tehran, Iran, lives in Paris and Tehran
Green Home was filmed in Hekmat's childhood house in Tehran, where a greenhouse has been built as the architectural and organic nucleus of the home. The plants are seen and treated as guardians to the life unfolding there. The video is constructed as an origin myth —the perennial plants in the home carry memories of the place and possess the ability to transmit memories and stories to different generations over time. The intimate and mind space appears in the distance between home and its greenhouse.
Anahita Hekmat works both alone and in collaboration with ethnologists, musicians and other specialists to create multidisciplinary and multimedia experiences. Using architectural elements linked to the past and destroyed (relics), she questions the capacity of a specific space to recall and reactivate the memory of the past. The world of childhood which is a recurring motif in her work and rites of passage serve as a reference base for universal temporal units. Her current projects trace the imaginary of war and childhood memories as well as the post-cataclysmic mnemonic landscape. For each project, she rediscovers strata of experience specific to each place in relation to political, historical and social factors.
Born in Tehran, lives between several cities
It is a story that mixes family photos with archival photos in Iran. The story is about the experience of a little girl who has two names, two lives (at home and in society) and whose identity is disturbed. The artist introduces a confusion between the images and the story told in the background.
Shiva Khosravi's videos are characterized by a great economy of means, she shows young women whose resistance to what they experience as oppression is expressed by the quiet joy of emancipated pleasures.
Born in 1987 in Isfahan, lives in Genova, Swiss
For Tahmineh Monzavi, the death of a cultural treasure is as painful as human beings death. The existence of past has influenced the young generation, but all the signs are disappearing progressivelly. The memory of people who used to live in these buildings has vanished. The artist chose to replace the emptiness of the atmospheres with the presence of women who are invisible in the muscularity of the society.
A part of the project Past Continues (2016) has been shot in Iran, the other in Afghanistan.
Since 2006 when Tahmineh Monzavi started using the media of photography, she has focused on the young generation of Iran and on "social contradictions". In her works, she has been inding subjects that are taking place in secrecy and are unofficial in Tehran. These underground social layers are hidden from the eyes of the public and not everyone gets to see. She had the urge to show deeper, hidden currents within the Iranian society, culture and art. She is working on long interval project of photo stories about women of Iran. She reveal taboos and sterotypes through the images of younger women and marginalizd people.
Rabbit is a self-portrait in the form of four videos that show simple everyday actions related to the five senses, such as eating, touching, looking and listening. The young Turkish woman questions feminity in contemporary art. It manifests an emic perspective of the khaliji minority communities that mirrors Melika's own life as a migrant in marseille. The background music ye mosht sarbaz (a bunch of soldiers) a classic rapfa masterpiece by Hichkas (nobody) also provides a very smart metaphorical layer to the entire discourse.
Like the rest of her generation born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Melika Shafahi grew up negotiating the paradoxes of contemporary Iranian life: the influence of American consumer culture versus the austere religiosity of the state; the divisions between public and private spheres. For her photos she often works by creating and colorful almost theatrical stagings that reflect her own hybridity, combining the light and composition typical of Renaissance painting with Eastern visual references. In her recent work, she explores globalized social culture, an aesthetic that itself blurs the boundaries between artifice and reality, fact and fiction.
Born in 1984 in Tehran, Iran, lives between Tehran and Paris
"There..." refers to an unknown country which the protagonist calls home. A borderless land with no features and nothing but soil. There is no architecture in this home, neither physically nor spiritually.
The soil represents an entity that embodies the potential for growth. It refers to the country, Iran; a place of multi-faceted possibilities.
In Persian literature, Iran is a feminine name and still many people are named Iran; a motherland which gives birth, wherein growth takes place. On Wikipedia, the most basic search on the internet, it states "a country is a distinct territorial body or political entity (i.e. a nation). It is often referred to as the land of an individual's birth, residence or citizenship." The short film draws upon the question whether the protagonist truly considers herself as the resident or citizen of that unknown land?
In order to be physically in this country, the protagonist is forced by the interviewer to be dishonest and doubt her thoughts. At the end, it is she who has to leave that land and carries "THERE" with herself.
Rojin Shafiei (b.1993) is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist/filmmaker living and working in Toronto. In her works, art is a vehicle for the translation of cultural messages and is used to present diverse feminine subjectivities. She presents these themes both through a literal documentary style and as symbols. Rojin received her BFA in Intermedia from Concordia University in 2017 and currently, she is an MFA candidate in Film Production at York University. She has screened her work internationally in various festivals such as les Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québécois (Canada), Festival International de Vidéo de Casablanca (Morocco), Limited Access Video Festival (Tehran) and Instant Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques (France). In 2019 she was the Venice Lands Art Prize candidate in Treviso, Italy and she won the grand prize of Startupfest/Artupfest section in July 2018 for her piece "I wait for the time."
This video is part of a series of ten individual pieces which experiment with body movements and performative interventions in different milieux and are then transformed into meditative moving images, or in other words, moving bodies inside images according to the words of the artist.
Sanaz Sohrabi is artist, filmmaker and essayist ; her work investigates the impermanence and malleability of historical records and narratives. Sohrabi is a member of the Feminist Media Studio at Concordia University.
Born in 1988 in Tehran, lives in Montreal, Canada