FARKHONDEH SHAHROUDI
SPATIAL POETRY

25.05. —
18.06.2017

First Italian solo exhibition by Farkohondeh Shahroudi, Villa Romana fellow 2017

Curated by Alessandra Tempesti

Lottozero presents the Iranian artist based in Berlin with a series of recent works created during her prizeresidency at Villa Romana in Florence, and four new pieces created specifically for the exhibition with the support of Lottozero/Textile Laboratories.

In Farkhondeh Shahroudi's work the language of poetry becomes sculptural, like her sculptures made of hand-stitched fabric: they are seemingly anthropomorphic creatures and animal or plant figures, suspended or staked to the earth. The stitches are the means to hold inside and at the same time exhibit an indefinable memory of a loss, scars, but also a primordial alphabet, the origins of a concrete writing that becomes one with the sculpture.

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE GARDEN

For Farkhondeh Shahroudi, the "space" par excellence is the carpet, deriving from the ancient symbolism of the oriental garden depicted in Persian carpets as a reflection of paradise

The space delimited by the carpet, divided and recomposed until it becomes a "self-portrait" in Me giardino (brutally attached to the ceiling but still endowed with mobility) gives form to that sense of not belonging that distinguishes the condition of the artist in exile.

Flying Carpet, one of the pieces created specifically for the exhibition, is a slingshot with a projectile covered in carpet; an ancient instrument for hunting and war, leaning on the floor as if it had just been forgotten by a being from a superhuman dimension, it is transformed with subtle sarcasm into one of the recurring leitmotifs of Arabic and Persian literature. 

poetic spaces

Hypha, is a web of hands in which the gaze stays as though grasped. The etymology of the word, which in Greek means netting in the sense of fabric, reveals rather the architecture of the poetic universe of the artist, made of interconnected spatiality and layers of meaning, like a weaving which etymologically is also the root of poetic text.  

Whatever space Farkhondeh Shahroudi decides to explore, she creates a separate and poetic world, such as the enclosed perfection of the garden of Persian carpets. But the spaces also openens to the outside, in the weaving of stories past and present, where social and personal spheres, both intimate and political, tend to intertwine.

with the support of