Vanessa Safavi Biography

Of Iranian, French and Swiss descent Vanessa Safavi was born in Lausanne, Switzerland. Safavi’s work is mainly concerned with sculpture and installation, but also sound, film and photography. Safavi’s oeuvre looks into the whole family of rubbers, mostly for their characteristic to be soft, elastic and transformative, calling the heritage of the “soft sculpture” or the “Antiform” movement, which uses industrial materials in a more sensitive way. For the artist, silicone, latex, wax and all kind of rubbers, soft and pliable, have the very particular ability to attract inner and hidden emotions. In her work, Safavi investigate the sculptural possibilities of bodily representation and questions the relation we experience with illness, sexuality and identity.

Addressing conceptual systems of language and personal narratives she explores and questions the contemporary identity of the body in the constant optimisation of technologies and its cultural impacts in our hyper-organised societies that has definitely driven it to a new sphere of identity and to a complex, vulnerable and schizophrenic fragility. Her work recalls the fragility of our bodies and the poetry that emerges from them.