Hadieh Shafie


	PHOTOGRAPHS The series of photographs documents my recent explorations of the relationship between text, the body and ornamentation. Providing the opportunity to construct self-orientalist images that provide a tool for a subversive attack on notions of otherness, exotics and beauty. Here scrolls of text are held by hands or inserted into the mouth or provide a backdrop for the figure in the foreground, inverting the relations of text to image. In Pari and Spinning Scrolls (2009) the female protagonist is caught in a seated pose releasing scrolls of paper with written text. The same Pari in Pari in fur (2009) is later shown with a paper scroll in her mouth. Man with Scroll II (2010) explores the relationship between text and the body. Here a paper scroll inserted in the mouth or adorning the body takes on an active roll in empowering the subject and taking away power. WORKS WITH PAPER: PAPER SCROLLS "Cultural signifiers from the East and West are often conflated to create complex formal and conceptual meaning. In Hadieh Shafie's ink and paper paintings, tightly scrolled and brightly colored rolls of paper hide hand-written text by the artist. Like 1000 blooming targets a la Jasper Johns, these paintings delight with the Op-art sensation of vibrating constellations of color and intrigue, with all the mystery that hidden words hold." Barbara O'Brien- Curator, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO Juror's Comments New American Paintings, #88 p. 6 A constant element of my work has been the significance of process, repetition and time. In works comprised of paper scrolls, individual strips of paper have been marked with hand-written and printed Farsi (Persian language) text. Each strip is then tightly rolled to create a core, around which successive strips are added. During the repetitive process of adding paper strips to create individual rolls, text and symbols are sometimes revealed and often hidden within the concentric rings of the finished object. The time it takes to make each work can vary and the time spent in writing and rolling the strips of paper is an important part of the artistic process and a performative aspect of the making of this work. The title of each piece documents the number of individual strips of paper that complete the work or the number of times the word is written. "The scroll paintings are a case in point: peering at them up close, the bits of phrases peeking out along the trunks, or half-submerged in inky dyes, convey not so much transcendence as someone else’s search for it, the visual remainders of an interiority we’ll never grasp. For all their preoccupation with the divine, these works underscore most strongly the stakes of being human and the boundaries that seal us off from one another." Emily Warner, The Brooklyn Rail DRAWINGS & PAINTINGS Repeated in the work is the Farsi word for love, or “eshghe”. The repetition of text and this particular word is a recurring element in much of my work of the last decade. In choosing to ignore the rules of calligraphy I create work that is grounded in the expressive beauty and individual power of the untrained hand. In addition, by removing certain language markers, such as the dots that signify specific vowel soundings, I eliminate a communicative element. In this way the resulting text is reduced to its most expressive form as a visual element. Concentric forms of text and material also take direct inspiration from the dance of the whirling dervish and the act of turning-on-axis in search of ascendants through forgetting the body. Mawlana Muhammad Rumi, the poet at the heart of the Sufi movement, has a special place in my heart. His poetry and the search for the dervish within are at the core of my own search and rebellion. "Shafie's works are the more disarming. Handwritten paper scrolls are bundled into a clumsily pixelated composition in "14350," while in "Overlap" and the overwhelming "205812," a single Farsi word--"love" according to her mini bio--becomes the solitary gestural element, repeated ad nauseam until something beautiful emerges from the excess." Bret McCabe, Baltimore City Paper VIDEO Spirited with a fascination for poetry and the dance of the whirling dervishes of the Melveli order, early in 1995, I began practicing whirling while recording the movements of my body, covered with the handwritten farsi word Esheghe. Spin (1995) is the documentation of the very first time I attempted to whirl on axis, which resulted in loss of balance, disorientation and my body’s descent into vertigo. I realized that my first experience of the dance was of utmost importance. Since then I only engage in this dance when performing Spin, and without any continued practice to ensure that my body will retain its intolerance to the dizzying effects of whirling and hence loss of balance, disorientation. Each episode results in a crashing to the floor or into surrounding walls, where I experience a complete separation of mind and body, the absolute physical need to control my breathing, regulate the beating of my heart and recover.