Shirana Shahbazi
In a world bombarded by advertising icons and populated by images that reveal us the miracles of photoshop better than reality, the photographs by Shirana Shahbazi show how to read what surrounds us through new, unexpected viewpoints. To do so, the artist chooses subjects common to both art history and our everyday. Seductive and composite still-lifes, portraits, topographic views or universal representations of landscape, Shahbazi constructs images able to turn into symbols. Her photographs allude to the manipulative power of advertising by proposing images which are actually their opposite. It is through traditional analogic techniques that the artist reflects on that “homologation of the gaze” which characterises today our visual universe: there is no subsequent transformation of a subject but a consideration on the complexity of representation through the prior processing of an idea.
Just like a theatre director, Shahbazi arranges simple but powerful sets in which the subjects ‘act’ by relating unexpectedly to each other or to the eye of the accomplice spectator. A seashell or a butterfly, for example, set against a coloured backdrop, both affirm and deny the association with taxonomy: they represent an image but also its idea. From the memento mori to the compositions of fruits and flowers, Shahbazi deconstructs symbols and allegories in order to then reassemble them and reveal their mechanisms. Her works question the relationship between icon and society through a subtle play of semantic overlapping: the shots in some cases are transformed into large paintings, in others turned into murals by Iranian street painters, in yet others they become rugs knotted by craftsmen. It is so that a group of objects is the starting point for a photograph which is turned into a painting or, in the case of the rugs, goes back to being an object.
Painting, sculpture, but also moving images, Shahbazi mixes references and contexts and creates figures in constant state of transition. The portraits recall the pictorial iconography of the past but, at the same time, can become fragments of an hypothetical film scene. The still lifes, meticulously arranged to echo a typical baroque theme, expose the relationship between figure and space. They can float on an undefined background that leaves open an infinite series of relations with the surrounding environment but also relate to an architectonical frame influencing its visual hierarchy. The tension perceived between plastic object and bidimensional transposition is replicated also in the choice of display which intersects representation, genre and expression, thus creating new connections between the images and the eyes of an accomplice spectator.
Shirana Shahbazi’s work is not political. Her provenance becomes ingredient of an analytic way of confronting reality which takes into account Western art history, the classical tradition of photography, the dualism between myth and the everyday and the complex relationship between past and present. In her work the photographic medium is a tool to interrogate the paradoxes of our visual universe and, in particular, to examine how and why we look.
text by Sarah Cosulich Canarutto
Just like a theatre director, Shahbazi arranges simple but powerful sets in which the subjects ‘act’ by relating unexpectedly to each other or to the eye of the accomplice spectator. A seashell or a butterfly, for example, set against a coloured backdrop, both affirm and deny the association with taxonomy: they represent an image but also its idea. From the memento mori to the compositions of fruits and flowers, Shahbazi deconstructs symbols and allegories in order to then reassemble them and reveal their mechanisms. Her works question the relationship between icon and society through a subtle play of semantic overlapping: the shots in some cases are transformed into large paintings, in others turned into murals by Iranian street painters, in yet others they become rugs knotted by craftsmen. It is so that a group of objects is the starting point for a photograph which is turned into a painting or, in the case of the rugs, goes back to being an object.
Painting, sculpture, but also moving images, Shahbazi mixes references and contexts and creates figures in constant state of transition. The portraits recall the pictorial iconography of the past but, at the same time, can become fragments of an hypothetical film scene. The still lifes, meticulously arranged to echo a typical baroque theme, expose the relationship between figure and space. They can float on an undefined background that leaves open an infinite series of relations with the surrounding environment but also relate to an architectonical frame influencing its visual hierarchy. The tension perceived between plastic object and bidimensional transposition is replicated also in the choice of display which intersects representation, genre and expression, thus creating new connections between the images and the eyes of an accomplice spectator.
Shirana Shahbazi’s work is not political. Her provenance becomes ingredient of an analytic way of confronting reality which takes into account Western art history, the classical tradition of photography, the dualism between myth and the everyday and the complex relationship between past and present. In her work the photographic medium is a tool to interrogate the paradoxes of our visual universe and, in particular, to examine how and why we look.
text by Sarah Cosulich Canarutto
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