Works
Works
Tausendundein Tag (Thousandandone Day)
Series of digital drawings shown as wallpaper prints animations flip books and gigital prints
Schriftraum (written room) site-specific work. sience 1999.
The Persian script is turned into an ornament. Covering the white walls of the museums, the characters serve Forouhar as “paper” for her own text. The room becomes a “writing room”. Whereas the white walls of the gallery room are raised to a universal norm and an unmarked instance, the Oriental ornament stands for difference or the deviating. The writing is also strange, if not alien, because it is illegible for Western visitors – as an “incomprehensible” text it becomes a pure ornament. In defying attempts by Western visitors to assign it meaning, the script remains locked into its irreducible pictorial graphicness and indissoluble representation. The meaning cannot be grasped; at best, the inscribed ping-pong balls, which cover the base of the installation, can be grasped in the tactual sense. The legibility is made even more difficult by the movement of the ping-pong balls, which due to their spherical form also offer no stable vertical or horizontal reading axes; they form new patterns over and over again, are always in motion, and become incoherently disjointed. Even if one has a command of Persian, the characters prove to be nothing more than word fragments and syllables, which are not subject to a linear order. The script ornamentation covers the whole room – the ceiling, the floor, and the walls. Viewers entering the rooms are surrounded by patterns, forcing them to give up their sovereign, distanced standpoint.
Dr. Alexandra Karentzos, Intersections, catalogue of the same named exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Australia, 2005
Freitag (Friday) photographic work. 2003.
The large, four-part photographic work Freitag (Friday) shows a detail of a piece of beautiful chador fabric ornamented in black on black. A thumb and part of a hand can be seen holding the cloth. The flowing fabric with its floral motif looks sumptuous and special, but neither the fold of the cloth nor the movement of the hand is clear. The question of whether the fabric is being held in place or whether the hand is about to tear it away remains unanswered.
In a culture of concealment, the significance of the visible is heightened. The fragments of the body that can be shown symbolically represent all that cannot be shown and cannot be said. This makes them eloquent and multivalent.
Friday is to Moslems in some respects what Sunday is to Christians. For many, it is a day of rest, to be spent with the family and on which to dress well. But it is also a day on which the long Friday prayers and sermons, so important to Islamists, are held at the mosque. A day when morality and order are invoked and defined, when the mullahs of Iran often speak to crowds of thousands, who then chant their propaganda slogans. Rhythmically, ecstatically.Text excerpts from Tausend und ein Macht, Britta Schmitz - translated by Ishbel Flat
foto by Renate Schildheuer
Trauerfeier (funeral) site-specific work. 2003.
In her work Trauerfeier Parastou Forouhar has taken fabrics that seem merely decorative to western eyes, but which are actually used traditionally in Iranian mourning ceremonies, and has made them into covers for office chairs. At first glance, they look just like loose-covers that are a little too short to conceal the legs and castors. Grouped together, they form a brightly coloured ensemble that combines the familiar with the exotic. This alternation between near and far both activates and excludes the viewer at one and the same time.in this respect, the work develops an aura of the kind that Walter Benjamin described as „the unique appearance of distance, no matter how close [the object] might be“.
Ornament and calligraphy in lurid neon hues printed on a black ground are superimposed on the fabric to fill the entire surface with the characteristic horror vacui of Islamic art. The verses, written and spoken in Farsi, have an undulating, ecstatic rhythm, and refer to the death of Hossein.
Parastou Forouhar deliberately uses the visually animistic effect of calligraphy in her works as a kind of self-orientation. She does so without ever falling into the trap of exoticism, for she taps into the dovetailing and layering of different cultures. Even for those who do not understand Farsi, the eastern horror vacui component is distilled to an almost oppressive situation. Visual elements such as the hand of Fatima, the minaret or the dome of the mosque are introduced into empty spaces to emphasise the power and omnipotence of Allah. And so, in the installation, they lose their decorative character and, instead, remind us of the situation that has taken hold since the Iranian revolution, in which every aspect of life is governed and determined by Islamic sharia law.
Although the eastern cultural stereotype is visually
predominant in the installation Trauerfeier, the sheer ordinariness of a functional object so closely associated
with bureaucracy breaks through any such false legibility.
Because of the stringency and simplicity of the installation, the viewer can make associations freely and can easily recognise that Islamic ornament is also a recognisable expression of an extremely strict legal system.
Through the physical presence that each individual object in Trauerfeier possesses, which is heightened all the more in the overall ensemble, terror and beauty enter into a thoroughly cynical synthesis.
Text excerpts from "Tausend und ein Macht", Britta Schmitz - translated by Ishbel Flat
Documentation site-specific work. since 1999.
On 21 November 1998 Parastou Forouhar’s life was changed for ever. On that day, her parents, both political dissidents, were assassinated in their home in Teheran on the orders of the Iranian secret service. Knowing full well that shedding light on this crime was not only important to her and her family, but was also a matter of much wider political interest, Parastou Forohour became a public figure. As an artist, she has tended not to channel her trauma, grief, anger and feeling of powerless into her creative work. The documentation presented here addresses the murder of her parents and her own persistent efforts to find out who was behind it in a purely informative way. Through letters, newspaper articles, interview transcripts, press releases, correspondence with politicians, officials and institutions, the artist gives an insight into the events and their aftermath. All the material has been photocopied. The papers are neatly arranged on cardboard boxes, with international media reports, letters and a selection of replies to them pinned to polystyrene panels. A photocopier is provided for visitors to use so that they can take their own copies with them.
The documentation shown here focuses on one single, unique case. What is not unique, however, is what the documentation reveals about behaviour and attitudes. It paints a dark picture of the machinery of state power and of a regime so incapable of trusting the individual that it resorts to control, repression and even murder in order to legitimise and hold on to its dubious and regressive power. The decision to present her own personal story within the context of art was a difficult one, for several reasons. One of them being that Parastou Forouhar risks being defined primarily by her biography rather than through her work. What is crucial, however, is that in doing so she shows a slice of life and puts it in a public form.
Text by Natalie de Ligt translated by Ishbel Flat
Blind Spot series of photographs. 2000.
A human figure veiled from head to foot, the original
surroundings cut out by computer and replaced with pure white.
A black, patterned chador is draped fluidly around the
figure, who appears to be kneeling in prayer, and whose position alters
slightly from image to image. Another motif, smaller this time, shows the same
figure, from the chest upwards, again in slightly different positions. The
figure in the chador is a man. He has no face. Instead, the viewer is
confronted with the back of a shaven head, a smooth, skin-coloured protuberance
that has no identity. Only a band of grey stubble betrays the gender of this
human figure that has been reduced to mere form.
The photo series by Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar leads the viewer into a black-and-white non-space in which the harsh silhouettes of the bodies appear as absurd manifestations of a sterile world. Almost life-size, the rear view of a man’s head in a chador addresses us with an immediacy that demands a fearless response. But what is it all about? The figure effortlessly foils our prejudices and casts them back at us: Who is speaking? With what right? In which language?
And beneath the veil, we glimpse an offer so deceptively
obvious that it might be an advertisement. What irony that holds for those who
immediately “understand” Forouhar’s super-signs of alienation.
The figures are sitting and standing in a world detached, a world that cuts through pathos with a well-honed scalpel. Literally. Of course, we can go along with that. But it is precisely because they seem so strange and so funny and so rigidly immobile in the face of their own inherent potential that our gaze tries to avoid the close-up, and we start looking around for other expressions of
reality. As we step back, we see the space Forouhar has occupied in a new context. Black forms align, the gaze drifts through the room, past flesh-coloured hemispheres. Sometimes in full, sometimes in profile, these blind spots in the robes mark a hitherto unknown body area.
On any given map, a blind spot would mark an uncharted area
where we would be likely to find life and forms similar to those in the
immediate surroundings. Yet this cannot be proven as long as no-one has been
there and documented it.
In spite of the harsh outlines, that would seem to be the task we face when confronted with Forouhar’s installation. No prescribed vocabulary, no hastily interpretative approach should influence the dialogue to be conducted in this room of empty faces.
Text by Phyllis Kiehl, translated by Ishbel Flatfotos by Jogi Hild
Behnam series of photographs. 2000.
In her Behnam series
of photographs, Parastou Forouhar exercises her richly subtle wit in presenting
the back of a man’s head ringed by
a crown of sparse hair, his face and body completely covered by a black
chador with a black floral pattern. The photographs of the man, reclining on
the floor in various positions, are arranged in a row like ornaments framed by
a frieze. From a distance, the photographs look like the kind of inkblot tests
used by psychologists. But as you step closer, you recognise the ambiguity of
what lies behind the serial alignment. This is the point at which Forouhar’s
‚ornamental structure’ tips out of kilter. For, instead of the image we expect
– a woman robbed of her individuality by the chador, faceless and bereft of
identity on the streets of Iran – what we actually see is a man whose thinning
hair is an adornment that really is hardly worth concealing.
text by Schoole Mostafawi translated by Ishbel Flat
fotos by Jogi Hild
Schilder (Signs). digital drawings. 2004.
The Schilder (Signs) series uses pictograms. These universally comprehensible symbols are compact, informative images that are easily deciphered. As a form of visual communication requiring no explanatory text, they serve to overcome language barriers. Often found wherever a message has to be conveyed at a glance – in traffic, at airports, railway stations etc. – they are more or less global signs.
But these signs
we see here are not so much street signs as signs on the road of life, showing
faceless women in long veils and men. Crucially, a pictogram has to trigger a
chain of associations, and so we read the signs directly as Women Keep Out or
No Women in the Fast Lane: Men Only. In a tongue-in-cheek reference to the
functionality, clarity and unequivocality of the image for as many viewers as
possible, Forouhar raises the question as to just how far patterns of
observation can be reduced. What is disturbing is that such patterns are by no
means unusual – otherwise, how could we possibly read the pictograms at all?
Forouhar reflects on the structures that affect the way we make distinctions
and addresses this repertoire of signs as problematic.
The fact that
the women are wearing the chador indicates that the signs are situated in the
Middle East. This, in turn, addresses stereotyping of gender roles in Islamic
countries. The space allocated to the women in the signs is extremely
restricted – they have less space than the men – and is defined by a red line,
which forms, as it were, a double boundary. For the boundary between the male
and female spaces is already defined by the veil, which marks the boundary
between the private and the public, between seeing and being seen. In this
respect, the signs are signs of gender difference.
Given the
controversy surrounding the Islamic dress code in Europe, Forouhar’s signs can
also be regarded as a reflection on the way boundaries to otherness are drawn. The
male figures are not specifically designated as ‚Arabs’, but represent a
universal standard. It is the feminine that embodies otherness. This
amalgamation of the eastern and the feminine has a long tradition; the
orientalists of the nineteenth century, for instance, spring to mind. Thus, the
signs represent mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that are still relevant
today. The East is the Other. As Michel Foucault puts it, „in the universality
of occidental reasoning, there is a dividing line that represents the orient.“.
Like the avant-garde art of the constructivists, Forouhar
seeks an elementary formulaic language on which to base a new grammar and
syntax of the visual. In contrast to the constructivists, however, Forouhar
deploys an over-coding of signs, creating an ironic break.
The signs
show the clichés so clearly that they actually present them as clichés, which
corresponds to an observation of a second order. The word cliché can even be
taken quite literally here in the sense of a print form that can be repeated ad
infinitum. This potential for reproduction is also a characteristic of the
pictogram. The ‚forest of signs’ is infinitely reproducible.
Text by Alexandra Karentzos translated by Ishbel Flat
Swanrider series of photographs. 2004.
In her 2004 photo series Swanrider, Forouhar pushes the ironic
play on difference to its limits: a woman, who is recognisably the artist
herself, dressed in a black chador, is riding along a river on a huge white
swan. The contrast between black and white dominates the scene. This
black-and-white imagery refers to the way fairytales are structured by such
opposites as good and evil, fortune and misfortune, the beautiful and the ugly.
There are also echoes of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the ugly duckling
that becomes a beautiful swan. It is the tale of the outsider who becomes the
radiant focus of attention – for the supposed duck is rejected because it is
different and has dark feathers. Such references to miraculous transformations
are an ironic take on the role of the woman in the dark chador.
Apart from the fairytale aspect, the images also conjure associations of
other metamorphoses in western culture: in Richard Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin,
the knight in shining armour, epitome of the German ur-myth, is carried on a
boat drawn by a swan that later turns out to be Gottfried. For her own
performance, Forouhar has aptly chosen the town of Bad Ems on the river Lahn in
Germany. In her photos, however, the swan is not a prop from a staging of
Lohengrin, but an ordinary pedal-boat by the name of Hugo, as we can read in
some of the pictures. Forouhar appropriates this ur-German myth and quite
literally alienates it by confronting it with the veiled woman who is marked
out as foreign and ‚other’.
At the same time, the pedal-boat foils the reference to the myth of Leda
and the swan, in which the god Zeus seduces the beautiful virgin Leda in the
guise of a swan. Here, however, in an inversion of such fertility myths, it is
not Zeus who covers the woman, but the chador that spreads out ornamentally
over the swan. Nevertheless, some traditional visual structures of the Leda
motif are recognisable, such as the long, curving neck of the swan echoing the
figure of the woman and her robe.
Forouhar’s work, with its manifold references to German culture and to
Greek mythology as the so-called cradle of western civilsation, adopts a wealth
of significations by which western society constructs and defines its identity.
This work by Forouhar is clearly aimed at a western audience, or at viewers
familiar with western cultural traditions, whereas in Iran, the different
cultural context would stand in the way of these interpretative associations.
Another reference in this work is the title’s reflection of the road movie Easy Rider (USA 1969) in which two bikers set off in search of the real America but, according to the film poster, „couldn’t find it anywhere“. The country they travel is by no means the land of opportunity and the land of the free. The film also uses visual markings to address discrimination and otherness. Such references undermine the fairytale idyll of the swan gliding along the calm waters of the Lahn.
Text by Alexandra Karentzos translated by Ishbel Flat
Fotos by Annette Hornischer
Iranian Fall. digital drawings . 2008.
In her new series of drawings IRANIAN FALL, Parastou
Forouhar returnes once more to the subject of the political killings in Iran.
The images are based on information she has gathered about the circumstances of
the killings, such as the photographs of the scene of her parents murder, as
well as on what she imagines the victims must have experienced. In that sense
her work is very personal. Adressing the powerlessness of victims of state
repression, Forouhar makes the personal tragedy universal.
Elsa's Verkündigung (Elsas annunciation) series of photographs. 2005.
The skin of an Indian cow has been decorated with Arabic / Persian lettering. The calligraphic signs, however, have no meaning whatsoever and are completely nonsensical. The sacred animal wears them with ease, thereby embodying the relaxed symbiosis of live-and-let-live between the two great religions that have long divided Indian society. This work was created within the scope of a workshop organised annually by the artists’ network Khoj in collaboration with Indian and international artists.
fotos by Anup Thomas
Safari Object. 2004.
Writing and space are
connected in a different way (as in Written Room) in the work Safari. Characters and
ornaments cover a giant sack. The title promises adventure, wilderness and
exotic worlds. The hunt though leads to the museum. Usually signs refer to
something, but here they cannot be made precise; they remain vague. For the
Western viewer, the writing does not refer to something, but to the Other per
se, to the inscrutably foreign, for which the Orient also stands. This
unfathomable, this covered aspect is visualized directly through the
ornamentally rich chador fabrics sewn into the sack. The sack is thus literally
a foreign body.
Some of the materials sown into the sack are usually
used for Shiite mourning ceremonies. They are brightly coloured mass-produced
fabrics, the same as Forouhar used for the installation Funeral Service of 2003. If one can read Persian, then the dirge for the Shiite martyr
Imam Hussein is recognizable. There we can read for example: “This king without
army accompanied by tears and sorrow, the wounds on his body are more numerous
than the stars in the sky … this fish, sunk in a sea of blood, is your
Hussein.” The meaning though remains normally concealed in the Western context
of the museum. What remains are the exhilaration of the colours and the
oscillations of the script. The shapeless, cumbersome sack further emphasizes
that they do not bow to the familiar order.
Dr. Alexandra Karentzos, Intersections, catalogue of the same named exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Australia, 2005
