| In Iran, like in many other Eastern lands, the contemporary artist is dragged into two conventionally opposite directions. One direction tilts toward familiar footprints that lead to a buried but glorious past, a sense of nostalgia, fear and disgust with the mechanization and shallowness of the presently emerging culture. The other direction is an impulse of aspiration to detach from the past and to reconcile with a present that emerges in a nanosecond demolishing the previous nanosecond. In this condition of oscillation between an Oriental nostalgia and thinking in terms of nanoseconds, I have tried to explore a historical memory, as an Iranian, in miniature images of a cypress tree that is reprinted thousands of times, and to reconcile it with an invitation to detachment, liminal spaces, and ephemeral moments. |  |
Farideh Lashai
In Iran, like in many other Eastern lands, the contemporary artist is dragged into two conventionally opposite directions. One direction tilts toward familiar footprints that lead to a buried but glorious past, a sense of nostalgia, fear and disgust with the mechanization and shallowness of the presently emerging culture. The other direction is an impulse of aspiration to detach from the past and to reconcile with a present that emerges in a nanosecond demolishing the previous nanosecond. In this condition of oscillation between an Oriental nostalgia and thinking in terms of nanoseconds, I have tried to explore a historical memory, as an Iranian, in miniature images of a cypress tree that is reprinted thousands of times, and to reconcile it with an invitation to detachment, liminal spaces, and ephemeral moments. The openness of the work invites the viewer to engage in a similar oscillation between the different senses that the work induces.
The work is composed of four cylinder-shaped fences suspend from the ceiling. The fences are made of a delicately knitted fishnet screen. In these sheer columns small sheets of thin Plexiglas hang. On each sheet the image of a cypress tree is printed, and poems from Hafiz about the cypress tree are printed on the edges of each sheet. Gestures of blue, green, red and yellow are stroked on the Plexiglas cards hanging in the cylinders.
One may search for a metaphor of paradise. This is expressed in the formal garden of palaces known as fourfold gardens, which are represented in Persian carpets as four plots bounded by four watercourses. Perhaps then one could read the four transparent columns in this installation as vertical rivers that are full of life with allusions to trees and perhaps flowers. At the same time, the cypress tree is a symbol of a part of the Persian identity that belongs to a glorious past. Like the cypress tree that survives the winter and stays green, a part of the Iranian identity and culture has survived foreign occupations, as well as other periods of cultural suppression. In many of Hafiz’s poems, and in selected verses in this work, the cypress tree has been used as a metaphor for endurance and resistance of the Persian identity in these historic moments of suppression.
However, in this delightful scene we are warned by the overturned cypress trees. The use of transparent materials, the flimsiness of the drawing lines, and the overturned image of the trees, together, convey an ephemeral character and induce a sense of fragility. It seems that everything is falling down and the delightful scene is on the verge of perishing. The suspended fences seem to be there to preserve an evanescent scent of a too-dear part of an Iranian collective memory.
Yet, in another reading of the work it seems that the image of the tree itself is a passageway to nothingness. As the mantra of the cypress tree is repeated over thousands of times, the form of the tree melts into abstraction. I am celebrating the empty spaces surrounded by the columns. The fences do not seem to be preserving the last moments of an evanescent memory. Instead, they shed light on invisible, private, but universal spaces that are the characteristic of our time. We do not experience these liminal spaces except in the very moment after deconstruction, and before something new is constructed. In this reading of the work, the overturned cypress tree, the sense of perishing of a collective memory, and the anxiety induced by this scene of falling apart is an invitation to experience modern-postmodern emotions of ecstasy and yearning. Of course, in the next moment, in such a performance, other modern-postmodern feelings of depression, despair and irony may erupt. But the performance, in this installation, is a search for liminal spaces and ephemeral moments.
