Sara Rahbar Love Arrived & How Read Meaning

"Did yous see what love did to us, but one time again" flag #32 2008 73x47 inches.

Sara Rahbar (born 1976) is a gimmicky creative person living and working in New York. She works in mixed media.

Life

Born in Tehran, Iran in 1976, Sara Rahbar and her family fled Iran during the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution and in the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war. Rahbar pursued an interdisciplinary study program in New York and fine arts at Londons Central Saint Martins College of Art in 2005. Upon the completion of her studies, between 2005-2010 she lived and worked betwixt Tehran and New York.

Rahbars work ranges from photography to sculpture to installation and explores issues of belonging, retentivity and displacement. Rahbars piece of work always stems from her personal experiences and is largely autobiographical.

In recent years she has become recognized for her ongoing, Flag serial (2008-Present) in which traditional fabrics and objects are reworked equally collages that form various incarnations of the American and Iranian flag, exploring ideas of national belonging, likewise as the conflicting role of flags as symbols of ideological and nationalistic violence. Her work has been widely shown internationally, including Cairo, Mumbai, Dubai, Madrid, Vienna, Moscow, New York, London and Paris and is held in multiple collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Saatchi Collection in London, The Burger Collection in Hong Kong and the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, India.

Rahbar currently resides in New York.

^[i]

Work

Essay Written Past Saheen Merali

Disharmonism of Ignorance (Afterwards Said)

On October iv, 2001, Edward Said, the Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, wrote a scathing review entitled The Clash of Ignorance as a response to the much acclaimed article by Samuel Huntington entitled The Clash Of Civilisation. It is important to call up such standoff of theoretical positions, often and excitedly enacted in print media. The brunt of Huntington'south inept argument, clumsily articulated was made threadbare past Said memorable words "the personification of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam" is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters similar identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike earth where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with ane ever more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary."(i)

Said, writing 1 month after the set on on the twin towers in New York, purposefully continues this questioning of rudimentary thinking and the terms of its engagement and application to larger complicated configurations including histories, nations and belief systems. Huntington's utilise of monochromatic terminologies from a populist language, with its simplistic trappings of deviation then applied to real life situations, was exactly the style that the 11 oddballs who attacked the Twin Towers came to represent 1.5 billion Muslims during this traumatic menses of American history. In such a devil-may-care moments, like Huntington's commodity exemplified, it takes immense courage to option upward the loose strands left in the affray, that assist in affirming both distaste and otherness. Huntington's article'due south immense popularity helped to reveal a sensitivity to the application of knowledge, conversely Said's response encouraged a render to a deepening understanding of the generalizations, which abound our daily thinking, of queried subjects which are reduced to common parlance by seeping prejudice. Past taking to chore Huntington'south bland and superficial categorization, Said allows u.s. to deepen our agreement, rather than to allow contributions that inflame the complex, which nosotros have leaned to telephone call globalization. Past careful scrutiny, of these terms of ridicule and in the unintelligent manner of their usage, Huntington's position becomes untenable, Said continued "In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are not: close-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate man history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not merely to incorporate wars of religion and royal conquest simply too to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing."(ii)

It is in looking at the differences that have been mediated in civilisation, including the cantankerous-fertilization of ideas, the migration of philosophy and poetry, the movement that has articulated activity and people, that we accept at present reached an immensely rich global stratus, where the palimpsest and bricollage forms ourselves, not "the bones image of West versus the remainder (the cold state of war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of September 11." (3)

New vexilloids amidst poetic renditions.

In her artist's statement, Sara Rahbar, comments on her family's flight from Iran to New York at the fourth dimension of the Iran-Iraq state of war. The post-obit essay is a reading of the artist's piece of work in regard to the arguments outlined by Edward Said, of multi-centric narratives, in relation to the subjective nature of Rahbar's implosive biography. This reading reiterates the artist'due south arguments for the notion of the stop of belonging- a nomadic-motionless-nationalism that rises out of the dubiety of purity. Equally the hybrid functioning, group La Pocha Nostra's manifesto states "If there is a common denominator, information technology is our desire to cross and erase dangerous borders including those betwixt art and politics, fine art practice and theory, creative person and spectator - ultimately to dissolve borders and myths of purity whether they exist specific to culture, ethnicity, gender, language or metier." (4)

One of the cardinal images/objects that is repetitively used by Rahbar and which forms "the chief" body of her work has been an object that has been around for the last iv,000 years. The flag, ane of the oldest recognizable symbols of nationalism and belonging in her spirited hands, becomes a foundation for woven paintings, a base upon which to place the accumulated denotations that she rummages through remnants of the exodus where once refined textile and embroideries stop up- the flea markets and remote accessory depositories. She skillfully stitches these dishevelled, uneven collections, edifice upon this about pure form, the Flag, into a new version, creating a avalanche of new meanings that dispel its authenticity. I of the oldest "authentic flag design" of ancient peoples includes a metallic flag from Iran, ca. 3000 BC, known every bit a vexilloid, which is likewise found on aboriginal Greek coins, Egyptian tomb carvings and other such reliquaries. Vexillology is the scientific report of flags. This discussion comes from a Latin discussion, significant to "guide". These early on flags or vexilloids were made out of metallic or carved wooden poles. Gradually, two,000 years ago, pieces of fabric or material were added to some vexilloids for ornamentation, which gradually evolved into the flags we know today. These coloured fabrics, geometric emblematic symbols, are readily used for sending signals and letters from a person or a grouping of people. The works by Rahbar are artworks, sending signals, even opening windows onto her subjectivity. (5) But since subjectivity is a complex reaction, it cannot be understood entirely separately from the material world in which it is based; equally a consequence, the interaction finds itself placed betwixt the viewer and the artist'due south intention.

What are the intentions of these works?

Beautiful and significant, are 2 of the axiomatic reactions to these series of works, imbued, every bit they are with selective, handcrafted remnants from traditional sources. The audience is fêted with nostalgia, gleaned from patterns, which take been floating within the visual sphere for generations. Like with quilts, one starts to examine the richness of design, their magnificent, embroiled history blending to make calligraphic sense and abstractions fatigued from nature; a whole universe of interpretations is made possible. Lush landscapes of birds, animals and animal occupy and create a plethora of images within which the ocular resides. The rustic is interspersed with various repetitions; the flag works are made to shape our imagination, but besides to violate our senses by articulating anxieties. We are unleashed into a museum that combines the seemingly sacred, the artisanal and (un)bracketed fragments of atrocities. The work uses tradition to recover a sense of history, implying questions by the utilize of indexed positions. A co-being develops, which helps to configure the critical understanding of their narrative paradigms. These flags help to scrutinize dualities that are continuous for the artist, the duality of Islamic republic of iran and America.

In multiplying the number of possible readings past drawing on heritage, it provides a diachronic innovation inside which interpoetic relations are realizable- both on the level of aesthetic inventions from multiple sources but in how styles and ideas illustrate certain realities- of geographies, of hope and of history. In routing the audience through the multiple spaces that one prototype tin occupy, Rahbar manages to provide a matrix within which a cultural translation and contradiction is articulated. By curating tradition, as these beautiful flags exercise, they attract both the western gaze and allow for an aesthetic dynamism to be exemplified. We brainstorm with attraction and end upwards existence repulsed within the same moment of negotiating her works- in refusing the awful to exist removed from the works, Rahbar creates a political power that imbues her statement of seeing and being.

Ofttimes, the stripes in the American flag are replaced by slithers of heavily embroidered fabrics, drooping similar an ethnic and ethical compass, accompanying the blue background and white stars that symbolize the number of states in the The states. State authority remains a counter point in this negotiated hegemony, replaced past a counter public –represented past fragments often drawn from women'southward work-which then becomes the symbol of the nation. These adventures of inclusion are often titled with poetic lines, cartoon on another level of alienation-confusion reigns, every bit nosotros are bombarded with mixed messages of critical improvisation and protest of cited Islamic culture in the changed optics of infectious Americana. In her quest to create beauty, these works as well destabilize our notion of altitude, similar magnets of cultural power; the flags create a critical vigilance but deny one territory. These asymmetrical renderings are titled past what often seems to be derived from love tempered, of unmarked cases of silent suffering, of systems cleaved down, "Those days are gone", "As I step forward your promises dissolve and deliquesce" and "unstable, you disappear in the altitude" shifting again the paradigm of our reading.

In inventing a new sensibility to our reading of her piece of work, through poetic references, she endows usa with further knowledge. Rahbars aim and oblique references allow for a further archaeology of impressions to be unearthed. We go complicit in her gestural equally well as her poetic references, located in her narrative, even resentful in our identification with beauty and grace. This proximity, this closeness, allows usa to linger, to exist part of the dense sense of the personal imagery, text and iconography. We reconcile our perceptions and artful centric reading, even postponing the source of her protest. The combination of images and text as title makes us aware of her full intention, which becomes- one of unreleased inculcating anxiety in these isolated moments betwixt us and 'her' and between the ii phases of looking at her image and understanding it through the championship.

This bewildering set of flags, vexilloids returned, with its orientalist coding and bound symbolism, allows the audience to exist absorbed past the multifarious information which structures the restricted field of its momentary vision, connecting the contemporaneous to a historical and cultural translation and the violated, croaky, conflictive ambiguity between the demand of living tradition and occluded modernities, mesmerizing united states with the duality of belonging that consistently works inside the vectors that modulate between the influence of signs of progress and her mission to play with all its registers.

Honey arrived & how ruddy

Similarly, in the accompanying photographic work, we see two hooded subjects, with slits for optics and oral fissure; in function tribal, in function a guerrilla presence, rather than interned subjects- a conflictive aesthetics develops here. The piece of work seems to stalk partly as a reaction to the on-going psychiatric experiments carried out in the Center E, with martyrdoms, Bagram Bases and enforced internal deportation (of values, goods and alliances). Her dramatic photographic work, Love arrived & how red, could exist read, reasonably and by assumption, in the championship's reference to traditional societies' horrific expectation of a virgin helpmate, but this would be a symbolic reading of such a rich, convoluted series of performed contacts between the two protagonists. The first few images, are of a adult female, covered in a tribal, star shaped headdress-of a blazon usually used to decorate donkeys and horses, with exuberant fabric pompoms and wearing an embroidered dress standing next to a guard in a full balaclava. Her neck appears bedecked by military braids, in the colours of the flags of the USA and Iran.

She is joined in this series past a man, dressed in fatigues and army boots as well wearing a balaclava just resplendent in military braids, hanging from his shoulder in the colours of the flag of Iran. In the next set up of images, we see the couple in a wedding pose, in which the female counterpart is dressed in a white bridal gown and a veil made from the American flag. In afterwards images, the woman, now deceased, is held in a Christ-similar pieta posture. Her sudden demise follows the path of the military braids, as they are initially nowadays on both of the two protagonists, starting every bit a concentrated mass on the female person, then gradually beingness transferred to the male person in the purer nationalistic colours of Iran.

This bewildering set of works, with its nationalist coding and symbolism, allows the audition to be captivated by the dominance of the genre of data which structures the restricted field of patriotism. Connecting modernity to militaristic agency and the violated, cracked, conflictive ambiguity between the genders, it mesmerises the states with the duality of belonging that consistently works within the vectors that modulate between the boiler of evil and the erasure of life.

In ane of her recent statements, she states, "Our foundations lay, but our houses have burned to the ground. Building castles in the heaven, for a species that cannot fly, brick by limb nosotros tear it down. Thinking that nosotros are moving forwards, nevertheless moving backwards all along. Gajar woman and golden toys, we wait for dawn." (6) Even within this contemporary evocation, across borders and palpitating with barbarism, her constant vigilance regarding the fallen by and an unrealized hereafter remain the means of her economy and imagination. The global neighborhood, she inhabits, where disenfranchisement through plight and flight are becoming important, offer the fragments by which nosotros understand the configurations of the United states of america version of free merchandise and democracy.

Rahbar was born in Tehran nonetheless was forced to leave with her family during the period of immense upheaval that followed the revolution in Iran and the commencement of the Islamic republic of iran-Iraq war, has created a maligned altitude. A relational proximity has developed, based on memory, longing and inertia in inhabiting tensions of dual disjuncture. Rahbar's antagonisms were further exacerbated and encouraged during her studies in London and New York, and now she spends most of her productive life between Tehran and New York. In this going back and forth, an apocalyptic retention has been revised in her reworking of traditional materials into proto-gimmicky textiles and textures of national belonging.

The symbol of ideological and nationalistic violence, the Flag, remains one of the main focuses of her collage conversations and contestations, just information technology is in these performative sites which are photographed, where her magisterial potency and exclamation virtually order and culture remain poised on the brink of dubiety and confrontation. As one of her aptly titled works suggests, "unstable, you disappear in the distance"

Artist Argument

It's about falling, standing and attempting to survive it all. In the end we are all in exile, we are all just visiting and we all come to this earth lonely and we go out solitary.

But while nosotros are here nosotros endeavor so desperately to belong to something, to someone and to somewhere.

Metamorphosing and transforming for the means of surviving it all, our foundations lay, simply our houses have burned to the ground.

Building castles in the heaven, for a species that cannot fly, brick past limb we tear information technology down.

Thinking that nosotros are moving forwards, yet moving backwards all forth.

Gajar woman and golden toys, we wait for dawn

External links

• Sara Rahbar
• Carbon 12 Dubai
• Hilger Contemporary

Notes and references

1. ^ http://www.sararahbar.com/index.php?page=23

Persondata
Name	Rahbar, Sara
Alternative names
Short description
Engagement of birth	1976
Place of birth
Date of decease
Place of decease

smithyouseliked.blogspot.com

Source: https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/11874358

Share this post