Conjuring Flames
Morehshin Allahyari, Pardiss Amerian, Anahita Bagheri, Ala Dehghan, Leila Seyedzadeh and Hadieh Shafie
Curated by Lila Nazemian
June 23 - Aug 18, 2023 at 21 Cortlandt Alley, 2nd Floor New York
Pardiss Amerian, Tale of Bright Water (2021),
oil on linen,
25 x 20 in.
Arsenal Contemporary Art New York is pleased to present Conjuring Flames, an exhibition curated by Lila Nazemian featuring artists Morehshin Allahyari, Pardiss Amerian, Anahita Bagheri, Ala Dehghan, Leila Seyedzadeh and Hadieh Shafie.
Conjuring Flames is inspired by the writings of the twelfth century Iranian philosopher and mystic Sohrevardi as described in his book, Aql-e Sorkh (The Red Intellect). The founder of the school of Illuminationism, where light is the source of all knowledge, Sohrevardi’s complex and extensive teachings combined Islamic, Platonic, Hermetic and Zoroastrian philosophies. In Aql-e Sorkh, a falcon (humanity) escapes captivity and encounters a wiseman (The Red Intellect, Sohrevardi himself) who recounts seven wonders he has seen of the world. Key elements of the story are derived from the Quran and the Shahnameh (The Persian Book of Kings). Rooted in his belief that the approach to consciousness must be both discursive and intuitive, based in logic as well as the senses, Sohrevardi’s The Red Intellect proposes a philosophy of life in which to strike a balance between the material and spiritual worlds. Just as the spiritual world represents all that is light, the carnal plane is dark. When light breaks darkness, they turn red, as seen in the sky during sunrise, or in the flames of a fire. Conjuring Flames reflects this coexisting world of light and darkness through the artists’ works that explore elements from Persian literature and nature.
Within the exhibition, nature is approached as a representation of this balance between the material and spiritual worlds; a symbiosis of concurrent light and dark in Sohrevardi’s philosophy. The title of the show, Conjuring Flames, alludes to the continuous struggle for humanity to achieve this sacred balance. These dualities and the presence of nature as well as spiritual beings appear in the artists’ works, installed across intertwined areas of light and dark throughout the space. The range of mediums includes works on paper, painting, sculpture, installation and video, thereby reflecting the breadth of traditions, both traditional and contemporary, with which the artists engage and transform.
Pardiss Amerian’s oil paintings emerge from the tradition of illuminated manuscripts, hand-made books from the 12th -17th centuries containing epic poems and tales from Persianate and Islamic worlds, alongside illustrations in the miniature painting tradition. Amerian’s use of techniques such as decalcomania result in happenstance semblances to scenic landscapes in miniature paintings. She further experiments with form by adding layers and removing others by sanding the canvas, resulting in delicate abstractions with stone-like textures and gestures towards figurative shapes. Inspired by both classical and modern works of Persian prose and verse, such as Nizami and Forough Farrokhzad, her works on view revisit seminal scenes in renowned love stories.
Hadieh Shafie’s practice similarly engages with traditions pertaining to Islamic art, such as illuminated manuscripts, calligraphy, and miniature, in addition to Western art such as the Abstract Expressionist and the Color field movements. Constructed of thousands of hand-painted strips of paper and deeply engaged in the investigation of color, the ketabs (books) contain the repetitive word, eshgh, (love/passion). This containment of text within the work reverses the traditional relationship between text and image established by illuminated manuscripts. In two new works from the Sayeha series, Shafie partially dips rolled strips of paper in ink resulting in the fragmented interplay of light and dark across cyclical patterns. In the works from her Draw/Cut/Rotate and Safar series, the word eshgh or safar (travel) is drawn as elongated parallel lines stretching across the length of the paper. The text, being fully revealed, is nevertheless completely abstracted by the rotation of individually cut circular bands, forming blossoms of abstracted language.
Mountain representations are a recurring topography within Leila Seyedzadeh’s practice which includes installations, drawings, sculptures and textile paintings. New drawings on view in the show are depictions based on the artist’s various landscape installations. Large hand-dyed fabrics draped and displayed in the form of mountains are finely rendered in colored markers. She often references mountains from Iranian myth and literature, such as the Qaf mountain which also plays a seminal role in The Red Intellect as the first wonder described by the wiseman. Her landscape paintings are made from colorful textiles such as hand-dyed cotton, found fabric, fringe, ribbon and other malleable materials that illustrate subconscious imagery inspired by the artist’s environmental surroundings. The amalgamation of various patterned textiles reflects compositions and motifs present in the Shiraz school of miniature painting (mid-14th to early-16th centuries). A new landscape painting on view features depictions of New York’s East River as it flows through vivid terrains of the Alborz mountain range.
The Alborz mountains and the mesmerizing flora that grow in its ecosystem are also a source of inspiration for Anahita Bagheri. Consisting of abstracted vines, flowers and buds, her sculptures are enlarged iterations of tiny wildflowers that she encounters when mountaineering in northern Tehran. Made from papier-maché which she then covers in colorfully painted brushstrokes, the new works made for the exhibition possess a phantasmal elegance that balances both beauty and contortion, life and decomposition. The medium of papier-maché was traditionally used in painted and lacquered boxes, trays and cases upon which were depictions of kings, battles, decorative flowers or scenes from Persian literature. While maintaining the primary elements of this craft which has been practiced in Iran since the 16th century Safavid era, Bagheri reverses its scale, transforming contained painted portrayals into large three dimensional forms.
Ala Dehghan’s work reflects echoes of surrealism, manifesting subconscious sceneries of mythical beings and creatures, such as the jinn and multi-headed snake in her colored-pencil works on paper. Deeply sensorial, her mixed-media textile installations are designed to reorient the viewer’s perception and sense of self. In one piece, vibrant strata of fabric in varying transparencies become conduits for visualizing alternate realities within space. In another work, Dehghan illustrates a luminous tree upon a black fabric, reminiscent of the sacred Tuba tree from paradise described in the Quran. It was also referenced in The Red Intellect, where the Tuba’s roots are said to descend down to the earth’s surface and to be used by humans engulfed in the carnal world as a recourse for pulling themselves out of the darkness and into the light of the divine. Dehghan’s video installation, made of various found objects, is a fragmented montage imagined and staged as an enigmatic theater of its own existence, akin to a personal altar that becomes a reflection of the psyche.
Morehshin Allahyari’s 3-D printed sculpture and video on view are drawn from her archival project She Who Sees the Unknown (2016–2021), an annotated and illustrated archive in Arabic, English and Persian of manuscripts and other sources from Islamic mythologies and the occult sciences. The archive focuses on female and non-binary jinn figures that Allahyari recreates using VR and various other interactive technologies, as a lens from which to reinterpret and recount the catastrophic onslaught of colonialism, patriarchism and environmental degradation throughout the Middle East. According to pre-islamic and Islamic theology, jinn are sentient beings made of smokeless fire that can influence humans in their plane of existence. Allahyari’s video features Huma, a jinn attributed to causing temperatures to rise in the human body (fever). In the work, Huma’s power to raise temperatures is reappropriated to respond to current climate change and to counter the prevalent Western-centric, post-colonial and capitalist approach to this crisis. The metaphoric narrative establishes Huma as a force able to balance injustice and level all temperatures.