Nazanin Shenasa

Nazanin Shenasa

Taraneh Hemami

Hasan Elahi

Suja Araj

Suja Araj

Calling into the Void: Works Gallery, San Jose , 29 September – 29 October 2005

Suha Araj, Reza Aramesh, Taraneh Hemami, Hasan Elahi, Hiba Kalache,
Said Nuseibeh & Nazanin Shenasa

by Sara Raza

“Calling into the Void” is a curatorial project initiated and executed Iranian-American artist, curator and art historian Nazanin Shenasa. This artistic venture was personally motivated by the desire to reassess the current notion and status of “Islamic art” via the language of contemporary visual culture. Frustrated by the concept that Islamic art is perceived as a passé genre in art history, which is ordinarily confined to the collections of worldly influential museums’ or universities’ Near Eastern departments; Shenasa was intent on curating a project that not only challenged, but simultaneously re-contextualised, the way in which this particular branch of art is perceived.

Incidentally, Shenasa’s project ran parallel with many recent and necessary international artistic ventures currently being pursued by artists and curators alike in an attempt to demystify and detach so-called “Islamic art,” or rather artists originating from the Islamic world, from an ethno-orientalist-chic or native gene pool, where everybody is perceived to be performing in unison. However, for San Jose’s predominantly, mild and subdued art community, “Calling into the Void” was most definitely a revelation, which was both rousing as it was bewildering. Shenasa was seen to have achieved this aim by extending an invitation to seven contemporary practitioners, including herself, originating from a variety of Middle Eastern or “Islamic” backgrounds. Each artist was invited to explore ideas currently affecting their current practice and resulted in an array of issues being explored such as surveillance, security, gender and disparity of place or identity and consisted of installation, painting, new media, photography, video and performance.

Drawing inspiration from the current climate of suspicion and terror, associated with the Middle Eastern community in the USA, increasingly heightened since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, are ideas echoed in Taraneh Hemami’s paintings interestingly entitled Most Wanted, 2005. For this new work Hemami referred to the countless images of Middle Eastern men and women readily available for viewing on the FBI’s website under the sub-heading of “FBI’s most wanted” and amalgamated into each image to create a series of undistinguishable portraits. These portraits resemble little if any similarity with their original images, whereby images of bearded men and chador clad women are unidentifiably merged into one another. The result is a serious of blob like and dribbled pigment images, intentional on the artist’s part, to comment on the nature of stereotype and homogenous categorisation.

In a similar vein to Hemami new media artist Hasan Elahi also explores issues concerning security, but in relation to the demise of civil liberties coupled with the increase in close circuit television surveillance within the public realm. Within his ongoing piece Tracking Transience/ Compass, 2005 Elahi is seen to examine the notion of the panoptican using the theme of self-surveillance as the ultimate form of performance art. Relying on the aid of technology Elahi has created a wireless tracking device that creates a trail of his every movement and accurately locates his exact geographical position. This information can be accessed at anytime by the public for free from his website www.trackingtrasience.com which contains all sorts of personal information such as details of every single flight the artist has taken since birth, his last credit card transaction, the meal he just ate or the last urinal he visited. For the exhibition, Elahi documented a series of obscure photographs from international locations he frequented and installed a laptop with access to his website so that gallery audiences could actively also take part in this performative project.

In contrast, Suja Araj’s mixed media and video installation Ensh'allah Fe Falasteen, 2005, takes its direction from a more overtly political standpoint, the artist’s Palestinian heritage, and the daily plight of her fellow compatriots whose homeland exists in a constant state of turmoil. The piece is highly charged and this is resonated by the use barbed wire, shattered mirrors and bricks that act as symbolic references to physical and psychological conditions that are reflected in the fragmented pieces of mirror glass. However, the use of text acts as real and actual reminder of the perseverance of the Palestinian people’s spirit for continuation in spite of their circumstances of spatial volatility and uprootedness.

Similarly, Nazanin Shenasa’s Lost and Wandering (Gom-gashteh) installation, a visual ode to ancient Persian poet Hafez, takes on board issues pertaining to both rootlessness and routlessness by creating a poetic and sacred space for reflection. The installation has been created on a grid like structure with beautiful silk flowers, vines and floating panels suspended from the ceiling whereby one has easy access to roam freely in and out of the space that consists of a headless female figure in an orange robe. The outside panels are accompanied by poetic verses in Persian that spell the word gom-gashteh, which translates to lost and wandering in English. The piece suggests a sense of emancipation that goes beyond identity and gender and borrows its philosophy from that of the poet Hafez who lived and died in the same Persian city in which he was born, Shiraz. Nevertheless, Hafez’s poetry, knowledge and insight would have one believe that he had travelled and experienced the enitre globe in multiples. The installation, therefore, functions as an ideal space of performing oneself without the limitations that would normally conflict and bind one’s mobility both actual and metaphorical.

Other works included Hiba Kalache’s Untitled, 2005, an intricate symmetrical Islamic pattern made of butter and displayed on the gallery’s wall complemented by In Transit II, 2005 rolled up eastern carpets that have been wrapped and baked in flour and spices. Kalache’s installation gives voice to the perceived female domain of the domestic space in Islamic culture creating a humorous and ironic work whereby the Middle Eastern kitchen and its ingredients actively perform stereotypes. Furthermore, Reza Aramesh’s Serving Sculptures, 2005 a piece with an uncanny resemblance to renowned British artist duo Gilbert and George’s performances, featured black suit attired Middle Eastern men standing bare feet on plinths and serving red wine. This performance was first seen in London at the Redux Gallery, an independent project space, in the exhibition We Have Met the Enemy and He is US,”February 2005 conceived and curated by London based artist Shezad Dawood. Lastly, Said Nuseibeh’s photographs Tilework from the Dome of the Rock refer to internal sacred spaces and pay homage to the notion of architecture as phenomena and examine the profound influences that spiritual structures have had on Western architecture.

Sara Raza
razavi_sara@yahoo.com
www.workssanjose.org/callingvoid.shtml
www.nazaninshenasa.com

Text © Sara Raza and all images are courtesy and © of the curator Nazanin Shenasa and artists and can not be reproduced without prior written consent, photographed by Bijan Yashar.