Tannaz Farsi

Lives and works in Eugene, OR, USA

Artist statement

My art practice is established through multiple themes: diaspora, identity, history, language, and feminism. I look closely at historic Iranian cultural objects and reintroduce these objects back into space and time, mediating their content and form. This is a way to consider their value beyond their status as artifacts of history and as a means for building on the generational knowledge of the many anonymous artists and craftspeople whose works remain in archives and museums around the world. By engaging the material and contextual vernaculars of these objects, I build upon a base of intellectual and aesthetic knowledge that opens their “social life” beyond commodity status. Questions regarding migration, otherness, labor, and the politics of display become articulated in the regeneration of these forms. The Topkapi Scroll has been a primary influence in my selected works. The scroll consists of 114 wall and vaulting patterns dated to 15th Century Iran and I have been translating these small drawings into sculptural forms. I am invested in how the dynamic exchange between these historic forms and the current political moment in Iran that is very much mediated through the Global North, can create compositional and conceptual complexity around ideas of representation, and expand the spatial, political and intergenerational relationships I create between image, text and form.

Artwork