PARASTOU FOROUHAR / Das belastete Papier
May 21 – July 4, 2015
The exhibition “Das Belastete Papier” is screening the newest works of art from one of the most famous Iranian artists, Parastou Forouhar. By using paper, an everyday object with which every one of us is in contact almost every day, as the means of figuratively connecting every human being, she takes on the latest happenings echoing throughout the world and captures them on the paper thus converting it to poetic works of art.
The fact that in this exhibition the title and the focus point of it are lying in the medium on to which the artwork has been applied is something that we rarely see in two-dimensional art. And it is rarely something that occupies the observers mind. But exactly there lies the entire point of Parastou Fororuhars exhibition. On noticing, isolating and highlighting the problems on which many don’t think twice about. With one of those problems she feels like she has a special connection with, it being the concept of forceful migration of the people from Iran and wider. That concept is easy to notice in the artwork presented in the Hinterlands exhibition.
There are different types and sizes of paper present, that mirror the different phases of ones life, that can be awaited after presuming that one has dealt with the change of the environment he or she is living in. And if we switch our attention to the things displayed on the medium rather than the medium alone, we see the successful usage of simple paper as a still podium for the stylistic expression that Parastou wanted to voice through her art.
The dynamical figures and silhouettes are simplified and reduced to a figural form only, that show no gender nor individual character thus can be understood as a rite of passage given to the observer, a certain freedom given to everyone to discern themselves as such figures and silhouettes. And that is exactly what Parastou Forouhar wanted to communicate. The simple facts that every one of us can be found in a melancholic state of deterioration and experience free fall. Every observer is free to feel the panic of not knowing when, if and on what will he ultimately land after the fall is over.
“Das Belastete Papier” – A sensible exhibition in a fragile world.
Parastou Forouhar was born in 1962 in Tehran, Iran. She is a conceptual artist that doesn’t have a special medium that she is working with, but she enjoys encompassing a multitude of mediums, ranging from drawing, through photography to digitally animated picture sequences that mirror the focus point of her work – women, especially Muslim women, in the society.
She studied Art on the University of Tehran from 1984 to 1990, and in 1991 she moved in Germany, where she finished her postgraduate studies at the HfG Offenbach, where she studied under the waking eye of Adam Jankowski, amongst many others.
She has been living in Offenbach/Germany ever since.
Installation views
Photos: Jakob Lindner