I bear in mind once I was a teen one of many issues I cherished doing was thumbing by way of giant artwork books stuffed with Persian miniatures from the Timurid or Safavid eras. They captured the fabric realities of previous worlds with their recognizable however stylized flowers and considerably formal figures rendered in stately or warrior poses, all engulfed by an explosion of line and design that lined each aspect of area the artist made plain.
That feeling of surprise washed over me at Arghavan Khosravi’s solo exhibition on the Rose Artwork Museum at Brandeis College in Massachusetts. In these predominantly wall works, Khosravi creates artwork that instantly engages with the illusionism of conventional Persian manuscript illumination however infuses it with the feminist aesthetics of Marisol Escobar. With the latter Khosravi shares a love of what I’d describe as mimicry (paging Luce Irigaray), typically echoing or copying historic objects to remodel them or exploit their weaknesses. In Khosravi’s artwork meaning the juxtapositions typically reveal the boundaries of singular photographs and they’re all the time tending towards the inventive energy of hybridity. She’s as a lot in dialogue with minimalist sculpture and second-wave feminist artwork as she is with museum-style shows and even the muddle of junk and vintage outlets.
“The Enclosed Backyard” (2021) completely encapsulates the power of her aesthetic. The determine, if we will name it that as a result of it’s only a fraction of 1, is seemingly silenced by a door chain lock, suggesting house isn’t secure, whereas a steel display obscures the gorgeous floral sample behind. In “True to Self” (2023), she instantly references a Safavid-era helmet in a Scottish museum, and locations her picture (or what she calls ‘alter egos’) in relation to it, bringing collectively two issues that traditionally could not have been discovered collectively. Then she locations all of it on a missile-like type watching a mirror that reveals her eyes within the reflection. It’s a visceral second.
She’s clearly rising as an artist, and whereas the sooner work, like “Parallel Lives (I)” (2017), should not as adventurous as later ones, “Our Hair as a Weapon” (2023) and “The Chook” (2023) are assured and fewer constrained.
She displays no want to inform us what to suppose, no lingering on unusual varieties in what’s changing into a type of orientalism in some circles, and she or he shies away from the media clichés of meals, Arabic script, or girls in chadors. As a substitute, she forces us to grapple with every object, airplane, and type, pondering by way of the connection between ourselves, our our bodies, and historical past. I used to be reminded of these espresso desk books that I might by no means get sufficient of once I was younger. Certain, typically it appears like we’re aware about all of the tabs open on her browser, however the entry to her eclectic thoughts makes it worthwhile, and even soothing, as a result of these are objects constructed with love and care, and wrestling with what it actually means to free photographs and objects from their prescribed classes with out dropping or relying on the significance of context.
Arghavan Khosravi: Black Rain’s is curated by Dr. Gannit Ankori on the Rose Artwork Museum (Brandeis College, 415 South Avenue Waltham, MA 02453) till October 22.