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Shirana Shahbazi – Art Papers – September 2010
Shirana Shahbazi, Eleftherotypia, Issue No. 437, 3/4/10, by Paris Spirou
Shirana Shahbazi ,BHMAdonna, Issue 97, April 2010, by Marilena Astrapellou
Shirana Shahbazi
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Shirana Shahbazi, Composing Composition, Profile by Stephanie Bailey, Canvas
Magazine, January 2012
COMPO SING
Through the incorporation of classic motifs
of still life
, portraiture and landscape, Shirana Shahbazi tra
nsforms
a conceptual approach to Contemporary photography into a modern form of mechanised painting.
Stephanie Bailey writes on how the artist
’s hand is replaced with an objective, analytical eye.
COMPO SINGCOMPOSITION
Through the incorporation of classic motifs
of still life
, portraiture and landscape, Shirana Shahbazi tra
nsforms
a conceptual approach to Contemporary photography into a modern form of mechanised painting.
Stephanie Bailey writes on how the artist
’s hand is replaced with an objective, analytical eye.
SHIRANA SHAHBAZI
108
pRofIle
Before meeting Shirana Shahbazi at Art Basel 42, I search for
influences in her works by Alain fleischer, Thomas Ruff and Tho-
mas Struth, from historic photo-experimentations by Brassai and lazlo Moholy-Nagy to Richard
prince’s non-photographic work and Robert longo’s photo-realist charcoal on paper works. I think of
Shahbazi’s wall installation in the New Museum lobby, a classic example of the artist’s extensive
Flowers, Fruits and Portraits series.
I come across two characteristic Shahbazi C-prints at Galerie Bob von orsouw’s booth. The rich,
pop colours of abstract Komposition-09-2011 are paired with Voegel-09-2009, a black-and-white
image of a bird in flight. The works resemble the placement of Objekt-07-2010 and Joshua Tree-01-
2008 in the solo exhibition Reverse Order at The Breeder, Athens, in 2010. This time, a black-and-yellow
abstract piece was placed against the black-and-white image of a desert boulder, evoking Ansel
Adams and early nature photography. Both pairings objectively represent irreconcilable dualities
and unresolved tensions beneath superficial exteriors in an investigation of the image and what it
communicates. I wonder if Shahbazi will be a reflection of her work.
THe IMAGe ANd THe WoRd“I didn’t decide to be an artist, I think I wanted to be a journalist,” Shahbazi recalls, as we settle down to
a discussion amidst the buzz of art talk surrounding the Messeplatz. This might explain why, in 2000,
Shahbazi founded the historically inclined Shahrzad Collective alongside art theorist and cultural critic
Tirdad Zolghadr and designer Manuel Krebs, an outlet where she could play with her ideas – and words –
109
Opening spread: (Detail)[Komposition-09-2011]. 2011. C-print. Variable dimensions.
This page:Far left: (Detail) [Stilleben-26-2008] From the series Flowers, Fruits & Portraits. 2008. C-print. Variable dimensions.
Left: [Objekt-07-2010] from the series Flowers, Fruits & Portraits. 2010. C-print. Variable dimensions.
more freely. Yet, having grown up with an architect
father and two artist sisters, Shahbazi accepts it
was no accident she studied photography and
design at the fachhochschule dortmund and
later at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst,
Zurich, a city she now calls her base.
As Magritte apparently painted only because
he couldn’t write, there is a writer in Shahbazi
that asks: “What can a photograph be? How can
you read it? How much can you lead the viewer
to get to the point where they absorb all the in-
formation you are giving to them? I think a lot
about the interaction between my work and the
viewer,” she says. “My work is like a slogan.”
It is interesting that Shahbazi refers to im-
ages as slogans, especially when she talks about
the impact of arriving in Germany from Tehran in
1985 at age 11. “My first memories of Germany
are dominated by the fact that I did not under-
stand anything. We arrived during the summer
holidays. Straight after, we entered school with-
out speaking a single word of German. I was
just sitting in the classroom and watching,” she
recalls. In this context, looking at Shahbazi’s many
wall installations, from her participation in the
exhibition, Delays and Revolutions, curated by
francesco Bonami and daniel Birnbaum for the
2003 Venice Biennale and the Barbican Curve
in 2008, the repositioning of recurring motifs
suggests a visual vocabulary.
In her New York triple show debut at Salon
94, Trans>Area and the Wrong Gallery in 2004,
Shahbazi’s dictionary is out in full force, in a
fragmented presentation across three different
venues; from the staging of her characteristic
still-life photography that is turned into hand-
made decorative wall hangings by Iranian crafts-
men and billboard paintings by Iranian billboard
painters. Alongside her more characteristic
work were travel photographs from China, the
USA and Iran, reflecting the sense of displace-
ment evoked in the very curation of Shahbazi’s
work over those different venues. As art critic
Roberta Smith noted on that 2004 debut, Shah-
bazi treats her photographs as “words used in
different sentences or translated into entirely
different languages”, in an oeuvre that is in a state
of parallel cultural flux.
pRofIle
“I was forgetting that the topic of being Iranian was way heavier, way stronger than anything else.”
CUlTURe ANd AppRopRIATIoNCould her early experiences coming to Germany
have influenced a linguistic angle to photogra-
phy in those early days, I ask. “I keep it open to
using [the photographs] differently and that’s
what [Smith] means when she talks about words,”
replies Shahbazi. But on her 2004 New York de-
but at Salon 94, she makes one addition. She
employed Iranian crafsmen to weave prayer rugs
which replicate her photographic images: “They
are not prayer rugs, though there are numerous
references that say that,” insists the artist. “They are
wall hangings. In Iran, when you have a rug with
a picture on it, it is totally decorative and for the
wall.” Her annoyance is palpable. It might relate to
the moment Shahbazi claimed the Citigroup pho-
tography prize in 2002 at age 27, with the Goftare
Nik (Good Words) series (2000–01). Using Iran as a
subject through the language of travel photogra-
phy, Shahbazi copied images one might expect to
see in Iran – a street scene, a soldier in the desert,
a mother and child – whose image was re-painted
by an Iranian billboard painter. “At first view [the
series] was read as the ‘New Iran’, which was not
my point at all,” Shahbazi said in an interview at the
Hammer Museum in 2009. “for me, [Goftare/Nik
(Good Words)] is close to the photographic work
I am doing now but it was far too complex. I was
forgetting that the topic of being Iranian was way
heavier, way stronger than anything else, so I really
had to take a complete distance. I pretty much re-
duced [the work] down to what it is now, so that it
could become more focused but at the same time
more open.”
Indeed, if Shahbazi is hard to pin down, it is
because she refuses to be defined by stereotypi-
cal reductions, where a single person or artwork
could stand for an entire people. This might
explain her interest in the reversal of everyday
objects and stylised portraits through mate-
rial and production. Shahbazi is, after all, a child
who grew up in an Iranian home and German
society concurrently, something that has no
doubt influenced her approach to the idea of
perspectives, particularly in a globally connected
world in which culture is at once heterogene-
111
pRofIle
Facing page: Meninas I and Meninas II. 2006. Iron. 124 x 90x 38 cm-- and 90 x 65 x 27 cm, respectively. Image courtesy Rose Issa Projects, London.
Below: With Wings. 2004. Ink on paper. 120 x 300 cm.
ous and homogenous. on the influence of Iran
in her work, she explains: “There are also ele-
ments that don’t come from Iran and people
often forget to mention those. I’m not denying
the fact that I am Iranian. But it also goes to prac-
tical reasons. I go to Iran once a year. I see these
carpets and I am fascinated by how these pictures
are made. So I use this in my work. for example, at
Salon 94, the photograph depicting a portrait of a
woman was paired with a detailed reproduction of
a handmade rug made by Iranian craftsmen which
replicated the same image took around eight
months to make.”
INSISTeNCe ANd RepeTITIoN Thus, as Shahbazi was subject to singular and re-
petitive readings as an Iranian artist, her own im-
ages reduce Western art history into objects iso-
lated against monochromatic backgrounds like
logos. But as she mentions the exhibition of the
Goftare Nik (Good Words) series at the fotomu-
seum Winterthur in 2011, it seems Shahbazi has
effectively neutralised her Iranian origins in her
work as an artist. “When I started my thesis work
“My work probably doesn’t look as heterogenic as it used to a couple of years ago, but no matter if I take a landscape picture or a portrait, it is a lot about this gesture of taking those decisions.”
Facing page: Above: [Gitarre-01-2009] from the series Flowers, Fruits & Portraits. 2009. Gelatin silver print on aluminium. Variable dimensions.
Below: (Detail) [Voegel-09-2009] from the series Flowers, Fruits & Portraits. 2008. C-print on aluminium. Variable dimensions.
Right: [JoshuaTree-01-2008] from the series Flowers, Fruits & Portraits. 2008. C-print. Variable dimensions.
112
pRofIle
“When you get close to it, the picture kind of vanishes.”
113
in Iran, it was very much connected to the same
questions and topics I’m using now. It just looks
very different. It’s almost ridiculous; I’m turning
around the same questions for 10 years, but at the
same time it’s hard to bring the work together,”
she says.
In this context, it is useful to mention Kim
Schoen’s use of Gertude Stein’s linguistic inves-
tigations into portraiture as useful in looking at
Shahbazi’s photographic work. Referring to Stein’s
distinction between repetition and insistence,
when insistence attests to the active presence
and vitality of a person acting upon his or her en-
vironment, Schoen continues, “Every emphasis in
utterance is different, every utterance attests to
ingenuity and difference, even though the topic
may stay the same. In fact, there can be no rep-
etition if there is insistence.” The insistence itself is
an act that relates to the observer, the observed,
the image and the image-maker, each role given
equal measures of responsibility. “My work prob-
ably doesn’t look as heterogenic as it used to a
couple of years ago, but no matter if I take a
landscape picture or a portrait, it is a lot about
this gesture of taking those decisions,” Shahbazi
elaborates. “It’s a lot of repetition and how to build
up these pictures. I repeat myself with the objects,
subjects and portraits, but also in the gesture of
taking these pictures.”
On the viewer’s part, one is expected to
work as hard as the photographer when deci-
phering Shahbazi’s visual codes. Reviewing her
exhibition, meanwhile, at the Swiss Institute,
New York in 2007, Ben Davis observed “a keen
sense of alienation from images in the works of
Shirana Shahbazi… casual viewers might not
get that much out of them on their own.” Indeed,
Shahbazi’s controlled compositional approach
both resists the viewer’s gaze and challenges en-
gagement. When I ask if extensive referencing in
Shahbazi’s work purposefully creates a distance,
she replies: “I have the impression that the work
liberates itself at some point from those clear ref-
erences. For me it’s like a starting point. Of cour
se, I use images like the skull because it is such a
loaded topic. But when it appears on a pink back-
ground, the picture becomes contradictory.”
Thinking back to Komposition-09-2011 and
Voegel-09-2009 at Art Basel, the pairing expresses
Facing page: [Komposition-2011]. 2011. C-print on aluminium. Variable dimensions.
This page: Above: (Detail) [Objekt-18-2010] from the series Flowers, Fruits & Portraits. 2010. C-print on aluminium with a map. Variable dimensions.
Below: [Schaedel-1]. 2011. Mixed media wall painting. Variable dimensions. Photography by Christian Schwager.
All images courtesy The Breeder, Athens and Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich unless otherwise specified.
liberation from an attempt at defining an image as
a symbol or icon. “For instance, when I blow up a
photograph of a butterfly, I’m not interested in the
butterfly as a symbol. You can see all the details,”
Shahbazi explains. “The same thing happens with
the carpets, the silk-screens and the grain of the
photographs. When you get close to it, the picture
kind of vanishes.” As one might view an oil painting
from afar first to see the image and then move clos-
er to witness the materiality and technique, Shah-
bazi implores viewers to get closer to the medium
of representation and understand a contradictory
language that teeters between reality and fantasy.
The result is a neutralisation of polarised situations,
in which images that at first appear simple, are in
fact complex, multifaceted and, above all, unique.
Much like Shahbazi herself.
For more information visit www.thebreedersystem.com and www.bobvanorsouw.ch
Shirana Shahbazi, “I am an image”, Frieze magazine, Issue 113, March 2008, by Christy Lange.
Shirana Shahbazi, “I am an image”, Frieze magazine, Issue 113, March 2008, by Christy Lange.
Shirana Shahbazi, “I am an image”, Frieze magazine, Issue 113, March 2008, by Christy Lange.
Shirana Shahbazi, “I am an image”, Frieze magazine, Issue 113, March 2008, by Christy Lange.
Shirana Shahbazi, “I am an image”, Frieze magazine, Issue 113, March 2008, by Christy Lange.