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keagen · 5 years ago

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Interview Video with Nazafarin Lotfi and the Teen Arts Group from University Galleries of ISU on Vimeo.

Nazafarin Lotfi: Subtle Time Online exhibition beginning June 1, 2020

University Galleries of Illinois State University is pleased to present Nazafarin Lotfi: Subtle Time as an online exhibition beginning June 1, 2020. This exhibition is organized by the Teen Art Group at University Galleries. While she was a Fall 2019 visiting artist in the Wonsook Kim School of Art, Lotfi presented her work to the Teen Art Group. She has been working remotely with the group and University Galleries’ staff since that time.

Teen Art Group participants in 2019–2020: Brianna Berndt, Jeremiah Berndt, Grace Bingley, Ellie Braun, Katya Cline, Darrell Cope, Joshua Dahmm, Lydia Fisher, Aspen Goss, Kasia Jankowiak, Grace Marcy, Kathryn Novotny, Korynne Russell, Maddison Satterfeal, and Jeremy Swanson.

The Teen Art Group was founded in 2018 at University Galleries by director and chief curator Kendra Paitz, with support from the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation—Mirza Arts and Culture Fund. Each academic year, fifteen students from Bloomington High School participate in professional development activities, take a field trip to Chicago, and curate an exhibition. The 2019–2020 cohort was led by Paitz; Monica Estabrook, Bloomington High School art teacher; and Tanya Scott, University Galleries’ curator of education. The group visited the Art Institute of Chicago and Millennium Park; participated in art-making workshops, meetings, and exhibition tours at University Galleries; attended an artist lecture by Nazafarin Lotfi; curated this exhibition of Lotfi’s work; interviewed the artist; and developed ideas for educational workshops. Due to the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, the group’s last three meetings were conducted via Zoom and this exhibition transitioned to an online format. The 2019–2020 Teen Art Group was supported by another grant from the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation—Mirza Arts and Culture Fund.

Nazafarin Lotfi: Subtle Time presents twenty recent sculptures, drawings, and photographs, and premieres two performance videos created since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Rooted in her experiences of growing up in post-Revolutionary Iran and continuing her education and artistic practice as an immigrant in the United States, Lotfi’s works address temporal and physical displacement, the ambiguity of borders, and the disruption of expectations placed on individual bodies. She writes, “In all the different work that I do, there is an urgent need to create space, to open up the boundaries and to complicate borders.” For example, her recent paintings are based on her research on stylized forms in Islamic world maps and, in her words, ways to “map psychological landscapes drawn from lived experience.” Meanwhile, the geometric forms in Lotfi’s colored-pencil drawings are derived from the floor plans and architectural details of her own home, as well as those of her family and friends living internationally. Rather than creating representational drawings of specific locations, she addresses memories of space through her process of cutting shapes, combining portions and angles, and collapsing indoor and outdoor distinctions.

Comprised of papier-mâché, found objects, and layered graphite, Lotfi’s sculptures offer surprising relationships between positive and negative space, interior and exterior, lightness and heaviness. They evidence the physical touch of the artist, recall the forms of boulders and other geological formations, and serve as an extension of one’s body in space. Lotfi takes this idea beyond the studio, often carrying the deceptively lightweight sculptures through parks, lifting them near monuments, rolling them through crosswalks, and sitting next to them on bus stop benches, as ways to engage people in public. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Lotfi has begun making performative videos of her walks through the desert near her Tucson home. In the 10-minute videos, the artist individually walks through the landscape, navigating terrain and wildlife but never encountering another human—the epitome of social distancing. She evidences gaining a deeper understanding of a place, while also providing a portal to a new landscape for so many who are sheltering-in-place in cities worldwide.

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flauntpage · 5 years ago

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TOP V. WEEKEND PICKS (9/12-9/18)

1. Tie Up September 14th, 2019 12-2PM Work by: Eliza Myrie The Arts Club of Chicago: 201 E Ontario St, Chicago, IL 60611

2. LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze September 14th, 2019 5-8PM Work by: LaToya Ruby Frazier (curated by Solveig Øvstebø and Karsten Lund) The Renaissance Society: 5811 S Ellis Ave, 4th Floor, Chicago, IL 60637

3. Between Land and Sky September 14th, 2019 5-8PM Work by: Azadeh Gholizadeh, Luis Romera, Soo Shin (curated by Nazafarin Lotfi) Everybody: 1722 N Western Ave, Chicago, IL 60647

4. Ruby T: Underwater Flood

EPSON MFP image

September 13th, 2019 11AM-6PM Work by: Ruby T Western Exhibitions: 1709 W Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60622

5. The Ship of Tolerance September 16th, 2019 2-5PM Work by: Ilya and Emilia Kabakov Polk Bros Park, Navy Pier: 600 E Grand Ave, Chicago, IL 60611

Hey Chicago, submit your events to The Visualist here: http://www.thevisualist.org.

TOP V. WEEKEND PICKS (8/1-8/7)

TOP V. WEEKEND PICKS (9/13-9/19)

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TOP V. WEEKEND PICKS (9/7-9/13)

TOP V. WEEKEND PICKS (9/12-9/18) published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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genshinconfessions · 3 years ago

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It's not that Ying'er isn't pretty, it's just weird to me to see people talking about Nazafarin like she's some kind of useen-before beauty when Ying'er came first.

I wouldn't expect a lot of one-of-a-kind NPCs, but messing around with coloration can keep them from looking too much alike. This would have been a great time to start rolling out darker complected NPCs. With Xinyan's skin tone, darker hair and the Sumuru clothes, I probably wouldn't have even noticed that she wasn't completely original.

(I know we can't be too hard on them, given what's going on, but Sumuru has been in the works for a while and I would have expected that kind of asset to already available)

you make very good points and tbh i also though that dark skin characters would be coming soon :( i guess we'll see them once sumeru actually comes out!

katheryne from liyue

#genshin #genshin impact #genshin confessions #genshin headcanons

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Thinks: Mistaken Identity

Sedentary Fragmentation at Heaven Gallery in Chicago, through August 25

Conversation between Hadi Fallahpisheh and George Olken

Edited with visual essay by Lise McKean

Yasamin Ghanbari (photos courtesy of Kimia Maleki)

Artists Hadi Fallahpisheh and George Olken talk about Sedentary Fragmentation, curated by Kimia Maleki and featuring work by Hannibal Alkhas, Yasi Ghanbari, Azadeh Gholizade, Maryam Hoseini, Mehdi Hosseini, Elnaz Javani, Nazafarin Lotfi, Sophie Loloi, and Raha Raissni. The exhibition showcases archival materials from the artists’ experience in Chicago and Tehran and presents several generations of artists who are often misrepresented by having identities placed upon them that do not define them as artists.

George: In her statement, curator Kimia Maleki writes, “[This show] brings together Iranian voices, generations, and alumni who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.” When we say “Iranian” artists what do we mean? Not all the artists in the show are from Iran and not all the artists came from the same Iran? Do they share aesthetics, ethnic identity, national identity?

Hadi: For me, there is no Iranian identity, especially in relation to visual art. It only exists through its language, which is called neither Iranian nor Persian, it is Farsi. The only thing these artists are really sharing is the Farsi language. But it’s funny, none of them are using the language in their work. If I am going to talk to an American person about Maryam Hoseini’s work I would even be so worried to say she is an “Iranian artist.” She was born in 1988, ten years after Islamic Revolution—in Islamic Republic of Iran. She’s not really “Iranian,” she is “Islamic Republic Iranian.” On the other hand, Mehdi Hosseini, Hannibal Alkhas, and Raha Raissnia saw Iran before Islamic Revolution, which was another kind of life.

George: Does your statement give too much power to the state? There must be some continuity for people in Iran that exists before and after the Islamic Republic came to power: language, family, landscape. I’m thinking of living in the same city where my father and grandfather grew up, there is a connection to history despite change. I imagine that despite political upheaval, there are similar continuities in Iran going all the way back to what we call Persia.

Hannibal Alkhas

Hadi: Yes, it gives too much power to the state. Yet, it’s important to recognize that the state is powerful enough to make a young artist say goodbye to family and homeland to seek on the other side of the world what their state doesn’t offer. But I also agree with what you say: There many breaks in the last 150 years of Iran’s history make Iranian identity very complicated. And it is much harder when it comes to Iranian art. It goes so far that we invent an interest in Iran’s ancient history. But nothing is left of that history. So much has happened since then and now. What these Iranians are proud of sharing is broken. It doesn’t exist anymore. Culturally it doesn’t exist, visually it doesn’t exist.

Exhibition view

I see some possible subconscious references to the idea of ruins in Sedentary Fragmentation. The works all look like ruins. Hoseini’s work is aware of that ruin. Nazafarin Lotfi’s chair is a ruined structure and her painting is a ruined figure. The jaws in Elnaz Javani’s work are ruined. That’s the shared experience of being Iranian that we carry with us. When we remember through language that all we are share is in ruins, it is a ruin of a culture.

George: Except for the square painting of Hannibal Alkhas and Hoseini’s paintings, there’s not a lot that recalls ancient or antiquarian Iran. To me, it looks post-industrial. Lotfi’s mass-produced chair, Javani’’s shipping pallets, and Azadeh Gholizade’s white floor sculptures make me think of modern construction.

Azadeh Gholizadeh

Hadi: It’s a great window you are opening: When I say ruin, you think ancient, but it can be a contemporary ruin. I would like to mention a saying most Iranian artist carry: “We never understood Modernism.” It means we never experienced the ancient era nor the modern era. It’s the connection to a ruin of something—even the title of the show, after fragmentation what’s left is the ruin of that thing.

George: Gholizadeh’s sculptures look like concrete apartment blocks.

Hadi: Yes, but as if the wind came through and ruined that block.

George: Because of their size?

Hadi: Because they are broken. I can also read it as before construction, before you build a wall. And for me, it’s same with all the other artists too. There was the 1953 Iranian coup d’état, then the Islamic Revolution. Then there was the eight-year war with Iraq (1980-88). Then came the post-war’s dark days. Then came a semi-liberal period of eight years, the experience of Ahmadinejad as president (2004-12), and the Green Movement (2008-09). The idea of social ruins has many different historical moments.

Sophie Loloi

George: Lotfi’s chair is not an ancient ruin, but a modern ruin—yet one form contains the other. And there is a striking formal continuity through the work. The form in Loloi’s photographs of the wind blowing fabric against her body echoes the bodies in Hoseini’s paintings. The black-and-white of the photographs is repeated in Lotfi’s work and again in Gholizadeh’s sculptures. The grids in Gholizadeh’s work reappear in Javani’s pallets and in Raissni’s slides.

Hadi: The question of who is representing whose body is always important to me. Hoseini comes from Iran and she is painting nude bodies. Loloi’s experience is American and her images is a woman wrapped in fabric. Not only that. Alkhas’s bodies are Western bodies. Or at least they don’t seem Iranian. They’re more Greek or Roman.

George: What kind of body is Hoseini representing?

Maryam Hoseini

Hadi: They look like Muslim Iranian bodies with their clothes removed.

George: I don’t want to say they are Iranian—or Middle Eastern or Muslim. They aren’t that specific. But they’re set against the motifs or patterns that place them. They are not strictly real or identifiably from the world. But they don’t feel to me as if they are from Chicago or America. Maybe we can say “non-Western” if we accept that as a frame.

Raha Raissni

Hadi: You can say non-Western. But it’s not necessary. The main thing is that they are nude bodies. She never made nude female bodies in Tehran. Although Raissni’s work goes to same category for me as Loloi’s, Raissni is older. She’s been here for maybe thirty years and her work is black. It’s dark. Both are representing what they don’t have. Loloi has never been wrapped in chador. Raissni has a Western life, it’s colorful, her work is a dark, black remembrance of the past.

George: How do you talk about Javani’s work? Her bodies are reduced only to teeth? For me it is medical or forensic. Sometimes they identify unknown bodies by their teeth. There’s something violent to me.

Hadi: Javani’s work reminds me of speaking, of the voice, of language. It’s about people who come here. If you go to a company that casts your body parts or bones, and you chose to cast this part, for me it’s all about language. How we are speaking with the tongue and these jaw bones.

Elnaz Javani

George: Yes, I’m thinking how without the lower jaw you lose speech. Another ruin. But we’re focusing on the Iranian side of the show. How does Chicago figure in understanding these artists?

Hadi: SAIC (School of the Art Institute) is the only school that really accepts Iranian artists. More than any other school.

George: I’m talking about the city. Does Chicago appear in this work? Or does the Art Institute mark a clear influence?

Hadi: Chicago appears in this work as much as it appears in any graduate student’s work after living in that place for two years. Not much.

George: Yes, that’s right. Only three of these artists continue to live in Chicago. The show overemphasizes the importance for these artists of SAIC as a place. And that’s my experience too. SAIC is not connected to the place. Only some students make a relationship to the city outside of school. But this show has been organized this way. And it does raise questions. We start to see the difference between older people and younger, artists from here or there. This is what is so troubling to me about “Iranian”—despite being able to problematize it as a category and say it’s not real. As soon as we start to talk about the show, we start to use it. We say, “What does it mean to be a young Iranian versus an older Iranian ? What does it mean to be Iranian -American or an Iranian from Tehran?” We’re comfortable saying we shouldn’t use it but we are also comfortable using it.

Hadi: I want to say something about the importance of reference points. I truly believe when we talk about Iranian arts or any show related to Iranian identity, we lack these historical references. You can’t make connections. It’s like if you hear someone speaking German and you already know what German sounds like. You can think maybe the person is German. But if you hear someone speaking a language you have never heard, then you don’t know what to think.

Hadi Fallahpisheh is a multi-disciplinary artist. He lives and works in New York. George Olken is a writer in Chicago, filmmaker/teacher in Cambridge, and performer in New York. He also makes cookies at large.

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amtushinfosolutionspage · 8 years ago

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Thinks: Nazafarin Lotfi Ventures beyond the Horizon

Interview and visual essay

Nazafarin Lotfi and her social sculpture

Lise: You have exhibited quite a lot around Chicago over the past year. Your work was in group shows at Regards and Goldfinch galleries. It also was in the Resonant Objects shows at the Arts Incubator and Logan Center Gallery at the University of Chicago in conjunction with your residency with the university’s Artists-in-Residence Program with Arts + Public Life and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Let’s start by talking about what you were working on during that ten-month residency on the south side.

Nazafarin: During the residency at the Arts Incubator, I stopped making objects. My plan was to work with my large-scale so-called “social sculptures,” meaning they could be touched or played with, at Washington Park in order to activate the park’s empty landscape. I did a number of performances with these large, awkwardly shaped objects. In one, I asked passersby to help me carry it across the street, and then across the park to move between the Washington Park area and Hyde Park neighborhood. I used this activity to initiate conversations with strangers and I made a few videos which were included in the show at the end of the residency. The residency was a good break from what I was doing in my studio. When I was working in the landscape of the urban park, the in-between of the urban environment and nature became very evident—the park as an in-between zone. My interest in creating an experience of interiority in the public space of the park became clear.

Hole, 2010

Lise: Can you explain more about using the experience of “interiority” while being in the park’s “in-between zone” in terms of what you’re exploring in your work?

Nazafarin: By interiority, I mean creating intimacy and especially in relation to public space. Interiority and public space don’t go together in an obvious way. I was thinking about engaging in a performance, an activity, to recreate the experience of “art making” in the studio and to allow people to participate in this private zone. During the performances at the park, people came up and talked to me about what I was doing. Sometimes the conversations lasted as long as 40 minutes. We weren’t just talking about what I was doing, at the end we talked about everything else.

Lise: What’s everything else?

Nazafarin: Last fall during the performances I felt like people were more open to talk with strangers. We were all in a state of crisis. It was the Trump campaign and climate change that always came up. It was interesting to see how the art became an excuse.

Cloud of Unknowing #2, 2016

Lise: Are you saying that your performance in the park was an excuse for connecting? And the connection allowed for what was most pressing to come out?

Nazafarin: People felt comfortable to talk to me because I was doing something unexpected. I was carrying or rolling a large ball in the streets and at the park. They approached me out of curiosity about the object. They wanted to know how heavy it was. They weren’t curious about why I was doing this. This led to funny encounters and good stories. It was exhausting too. I wasn’t intruding on the space or a threat to others. I was safe. Because the object was large it was thought to be heavy. Sometimes I was called a super woman for carrying it.

Lise: Who stopped to talk to you?

Nazafarin: More men than women tend to be on the streets, more young men were crossing through Washington Park. Everyone I asked to help me was willing to do so. Some had their headphones on and didn’t talk, but others wanted to talk. Some men took the object and didn’t want to carry it together.

Lise: What about flirting? Was there much of that from the men?

Nazafarin: During the performances, I didn’t feel objectified as a woman. Surprisingly no harassment or flirtation of any sort during the performances. I was more comfortable when I was with the objects than without them. One time when I was alone on my bike, not during a performance, a group of young men with water guns sprayed water on me.

Roundness, 2016. Photo by Tom Van Eynde

Lise: How did you move the experience from performing in the park into the gallery?

Nazafarin: I had a two-part show. One part was at the Arts Incubator and the other part was at the Logan Center. In the Logan show, I explored the body in relationship to objects through a number of sculptures, and they were accompanied by a printed photograph of a performance at the park. I wanted that image to interfere with how the objects were being read. I also collected everyday objects during my walks in the park and then used them to make vessels in the series, Vessels with Unknown Functions.

The Incubator show had two sets of videos from my performances. One video ran in a continuous loop, with me carrying the sculptures in the park through the four seasons. My performance was filmed every Sunday throughout the residency. The other video shows three performances: crossing the street carrying the object with a stranger helping me; taking the object on the CTA green line from the Incubator on the South Side to the Art Institute in downtown Chicago; and taking the object from the Incubator across the expanse of Washington Park to Hyde Park.

Crossing through Washington Park to Hyde Park is a theme in these works. I was interested in the transition between these two seemingly different neighborhoods. In this case the park is the border between them. There are many empty lots, almost no grocery stores or restaurants on the west side of the park, while the other side, which is the University of Chicago’s territory, is equipped with all these resources. The disparity is evident in the videos as you watch the bodies move between neighborhoods. And the park is the zone that blocks access from one side to the other. This is the space I chose to work in.

Starry, Speculative, 2016

Lise: How does the work you’re doing now in your studio relate to what you were exploring in the park during your residency?

Nazafarin: I was surprised to return to painting after the residency. I needed the focus that painting provides.

Lise: It sounds like you needed to retreat to private space after working in public and being in the park.

Nazafarin: I needed a clear mental space to think about the next steps.

Lise: Why did you turn to painting when you got back to your studio?

Nazafarin: Being in the park with the objects started me thinking about landscape painting. I began with creating some sort of spatial arrangements on canvases focusing on shifts in point of view from aerial to axonometric.

Between 0+1, 2016

Lise: In one of your artist’s statements, you say, “My practice is grounded on a desire to explore interiority and negative space and their implicit political tensions at the intersection with identity, landscape, and gender.” Is painting a way to explore your interest in interiority and negative space?

Nazafarin: In paintings, I move back and forth between flatness and the illusion of depth thinking through issues of representation of space on the surface. But I should say I didn’t make many paintings on canvases after all. I started making sculptural wall pieces and that’s where the interior space of the objects became a priority.

At the same time, I was looking at the Russian Constructivists of the early twentieth century, thinking about utopian spaces. I’ve taught drawing classes for six years, and teaching perspective and observational drawing made me very interested in studying Persian miniatures. I am particularly interested in Behzad’s miniatures from the Timurid era. The Russian Constructivists and these miniatures are five centuries apart and aesthetically and ideologically they appear very different but they both propose a notion of infinity outside of “realistic” representation.

Reproductions of Persian miniature paintings and paintings from El Lissitszky’s Proun series

Lise: Looking at these examples you have hanging here side by side in your studio, I can see the resonance between the Persian and Russian works. How do you talk about the two with your students in Drawing I?

Nazafarin: They are good counter-examples for everything I teach about creating depth using value, shading, and one point perspective. I am interested in these works because of their disregard for realistic representation of space.

Lise: How do they do that?

Nazafarin: By removing the human point of view, linear perspective. For example, in El Lissitzky’s Proun paintings, geometric shapes float forward and backward to the infinite. There’s no vanishing point to ground them to a particular location. In Persian miniatures the space is flat and there is no boundary between the interior and exterior spaces. There’s no linear timeframe. Everything happens at once and nothing is concealed.

The two have similar diagonal compositions and both move beyond the human perspective. In my recent wall sculptures, my response to these works has been to subvert the universal and supreme point of view of the Russian Formalists and the Persian Miniaturists and rather introduce the human viewpoint and experience. Instead of flattening, I stretch two-dimensionality into physical space, creating three-dimensional painterly objects with multiple points of entry. I’ve been concerned with the interior spaces of these sculptural paintings and how they are actually viewed. The viewer can bend or tiptoe to peer in through the holes to experience the work at her own pace and scale. In other words, there are multiple ways of entry to the content of the work.

Vista, 2016

Lise: Before we get to what you regard as the content of the work, can you briefly describe the process for making your wall sculptures

Nazafarin: I like to think that my template is the reality of my studio. Instead of form invention, I make papier-mâché casts from the objects in my surroundings and then collage them to make hybrid forms. I also use found objects like dust masks or things from a souvenir shop in China Town that I see walking to my studio. These everyday objects introduce aspects of human presence to these spatial labyrinths. I want the sculptures to be read as living spaces rather than as formal abstract objects.

Lise: These human presences are also points of entry into the works. When you mentioned the content of the works, what did you have in mind?

Nazafarin: By content, I mean the space trapped inside.

Lise: It’s interesting you use the word “trapped” in reference to negative space or interiority.

Nazafarin: When I make these sculptures, I am more interested in the space within them. I like to think about that in relationship to my view growing up. My bedroom windows were facing the mountains and I was always wondering what was beyond those mountains. It’s the desire for the unseen and the imagined.

Lise: Is this interest in the inside new to your work?

Nazafarin: Yes, this focus on the physical interior is relatively new in my work.

Lise: What about associations between interiority and cultural constructions of gender?

Nazafarin: I don’t consider my work and the kinds of space it provides to be particularly gendered but it is intimate and tactile. I’ve been focusing on interior space as the space beyond reach, going back to the landscape it is the space beyond the horizon. I look at the horizon as a beginning, an opening for exploration rather than a confinement. The horizon is subjective, shifts constantly, and is bounded by our point of view.

Thingness, 2015

Lise: Are your landscape paintings a way of distilling your experiences in the park?

Nazafarin: This is an interesting way to think about it. The emptiness and interiority in my work allow the viewers to have different readings of it. I’m interested in the subjectivities of lived experience as simple as the shift in horizon from standing to sitting, and thinking about these in relationship to the binaries out of which our identities are constructed.

Lise: Identity is subjectively created and lived within us at the same time that it’s imposed from the outside. As we and the world around us constantly change, the matrix of identity also transforms—rather like the movement of the horizon.

Nazafarin: That notion of how people see you became evident in my adult life. When I was younger and living in Iran I was more concerned about being a woman and pushing against the gendered stereotypes that were imposed on me. Being here has brought up a lot of questions about identity both in terms of gender and race. I don’t address it explicitly in my work but stretching sculptures or objects to their limits is a way that I hope we can talk about identity.

There’s so much fetishism in biographies of artists who are not white or straight and I find that dangerous. I didn’t become an artist to talk about my identity. I chose to become an artist when I was much younger. I chose it to address my surroundings. I chose it to access questions of imagination, as a way of connecting with and understanding the world. I think art is a beautiful medium for that.

Temporary Public Art, 2016

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