Arts & Culture

Art in the Mirror

New Exhibit at Stamp Gallery Explores Identity, Immigrant Experience

Hero — In one channel of “Dialectic of Desire and Denial,” the subject looks at her henna-stained hands.

November 01, 2018
By Sala Levin ’10

In “Mirrored Re-Collection,” the new exhibit opening at the Stamp Gallery today, Sepideh Salehi and Sobia Ahmad ’15, ’16 use art to explore gender, national identity, memory and the immigrant’s longing for home.

The two women bring different life experiences to their work: Salehi was born in Tehran and addresses how Iran changed following its 1979 revolution, while Ahmad emigrated from Pakistan at age 14. What they share is an interest in understanding their lives as immigrants and women through art.

The exhibit is part of the university’s Year of Immigration, which encourages dialogue and action on issues related to immigration, global migration and refugees.

The Stamp Gallery is hosting an opening reception tonight from 5 to 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Ahmad Dialectic of Desire and Denial Video Still 1920px

Sepideh Salehi, “Mohr Portrait” (2018, photography installed on wood panel with frottage on rice paper)

Sepideh Salehi, “Memories II” (2011, watercolor pencil and frottage on mohr on paper)

Sepideh Salehi, “Untitled” (2005, mono-print techniques, fabric, collage on Japanese paper)

Sobia Ahmad, “Pure” (2016, video still)

Sobia Ahmad, “Dialectic of Desire and Denial” (2018, video still)

This portrait of an Iranian woman combines photography with a technique that uses rubbings done on rice paper. The resulting work is “my way to see the role of the woman in society,” says Salehi, who describes that role as one of “critique and protest.” Salehi created the black pattern that overlays the portrait of the woman by doing a rubbing of a traditional Shia prayer stone known in Farsi as a mohr, a small piece of soil or clay etched with calligraphy on which worshipers prostrate during prayer.

This abstract work focuses on memory, a major theme of Salehi’s art. Using a printmaking technique to again incorporate the mohr, Salehi reflected on the controversial 2009 elections in Iran, which led to protests and the emergence of an opposition party. “To put all these stones together, it’s a kind of deconstruction and reconstruction,” says Salehi.

This mixed-media work incorporates pieces of torn black fabric that Salehi used in a 2005 video called “Strappa”—the same black fabric used in traditional Muslim veils. In the video, Salehi rips the fabric while her husband, Kamran Taherimoghaddam, plays a tombak, a Persian drum. The torn fabric and the instrument represent “a conversation between man and woman,” says Salehi. A new version of “Strappa,” featuring a group of men and women, will be on display in “Mirrored Re-Collection.”

In this video, Ahmad herself is buried in a mound of white cloth, chosen for its associations with purity. The video explores “gender and expectations of a female body, specifically the ever-policed Muslim female body,” says Ahmad. The weight of the cloth burying Ahmad suggests “the burden and expectation on the female body to present itself a certain way,” she says, as well as the erasing of individuality and selfhood.

In “Dialectic of Desire and Denial,” a pair of hands appears on two side-by-side channels; in one, henna is applied to the hands and the hands immediately wash them off, after which henna is again applied and again washed off, looping over and over. In the second, the subject (again Ahmad herself) looks at her henna-stained hands. “It’s about carrying culture and multi-faceted identities and both the beauty and the burden of that,” says Ahmad.

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