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Critics writing about the work of Shirana Shahbazi often insist on interpreting it through the lens of her diasporic identity. Shahbazi was born in Tehran, studied photography in Dortmund and lives in Zurich, while the subjects of her photographic series stem from locations as diverse as Iran, China, USA, Mexico, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Switzerland, Germany and Poland. Undoubtedly, this context has played into the formulation of her imagery; however, far more than any specific cultural or global identity, Shahbazi’s works interrogate the authority of the artistic masterpiece, the perils of an image-saturated world and the autocracy of visual representation. |
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Fashion Spread Chic – Mitra Abbaspour on Shirana Shahbazi
Critics writing about the work of Shirana Shahbazi often insist on interpreting it through the lens of her diasporic identity. Shahbazi was born in Tehran, studied photography in Dortmund and lives in Zurich, while the subjects of her photographic series stem from locations as diverse as Iran, China, USA, Mexico, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Switzerland, Germany and Poland. Undoubtedly, this context has played into the formulation of her imagery; however, far more than any specific cultural or global identity, Shahbazi’s works interrogate the authority of the artistic masterpiece, the perils of an image-saturated world and the autocracy of visual representation.
Regardless of its technical and conceptual independence, photography has always achieved its visual legitimacy by operating within the hierarchical structures of painting as a medium. Shahbazi acknowledges the perpetual dominance of painting in determining standards of worth with her recent focus on landscape, portraiture and still life; the least valued genres of European academic painting, yet three of its most quintessential subjects. However, even as she turns to the traditions of the medium for subject matter, she pointedly acts against those structures of painting that establish value based on material and formal originality as well as the inherent monumentality or morality of the subject matter as it is distanced from the vulgarity of popular culture, the commercial and the decorative.
All drawn from her body of photographic images, Shahbazi’s work takes the form of large constellations of individual images, mural-sized paintings commissioned from Iranian billboard artists and traditional, hand-knotted, photo-realistic Persian carpets, similarly commissioned. Her images appear somewhat like snapshots because of their everyday subject matter and lack of narrative drama; however, closer examination reveals a series of highly aesthetic compositions and intentionally reoccurring themes and postures. Indeed, quotidian subject matter as well as shifting the medium of the photographic image from installation to paint to rug allows Shahbazi to de-center expectations about meaning. She often hangs multiple perspectives taken of the same subject side by side, rejecting the notion of a perfect, master image carefully chosen from the contact sheet or composed from a series of preparatory sketches. When applied to portraits, this technique denies the traditional expectation that portraiture should convey the essential character of its subject. Instead, these slight variations in the viewpoint refuse the possibility of understanding the represented individual from a singular, fixed perspective, a metaphor that carries over to her images of places as well.
Still, Shahbazi’s most sophisticated and subversive gesture lies in the conversion of her photographic images into Persian rugs. Here Shahbazi actively engages the most readily recognized, traditional art form of Iran and with it the many Orientalist associations of intricate, decorative patterns, geometric abstraction and apparent political and cultural differences. However, Shahbazi’s visual sensibility clearly grows out of her training among German modernist photographers and their rigorously straight formal aesthetic. Rather than blend the two practices into a beautiful yet flat-footed hybrid-patterned photograph or figural rug, Shahbazi subverts both. In the carpets, the austere and regularized photo document is rendered as a sensual, tactile, traditionally handmade, luxury object, which, conversely, depicts an awkwardly banal, traditionally European subject on a blank background. Here, Shahbazi reveals that neither the photograph nor the carpet has command over the meaning of the subject, the form or the medium. In the context of the carpet, the photograph becomes a decorative element, and in the context of the photograph, vice versa. In the end, Shahbazi uses the decorative as an aesthetic mode to reveal the boundaries of each particular medium and to define its other; however, this is an other who, rather than point to its opposite, reveals the conflict within.
Throughout, Shahbazi transforms her photographs to question the authority of the original image, reminding viewers that the reception of each subject is mediated by its context. Moreover, aesthetic value, artistic medium and cultural traditions are constructed to fit the dynamics of power relations. Ultimately, Shahbazi is responding to the assumption that her Iranian point of origin makes her a spokesperson for not only her own national culture but also that of the greater Middle East as a region. Instead of either denying or capitalizing on the influence of Iran in her work, Shahbazi critiques the weight of a point of origin itself.
