The Impact of Tangency Nastaran Safaei & Farnaz Rabieijah
Opening: MARCH 9, 2017
MARCH 9 – APRIL 25 | 7:00PM – ۱۰:۰۰PM
Mine Gallery
The Mine is pleased to present The Impact of Tangency, a two-person show by Iranian artists Nastaran Safaei and Farnaz Rabieijah. A tangent is like a glancing blow. Perhaps you barely feel it. Perhaps the actual point of contact is so small so as to be nearly imperceptible, but it still leaves its mark all the same. A bruise spreading across a cheekbone; ink blooming across paper. We talk about tangents—that point when an object, any object, touches a curve—as distractions, as a kind of veering off course. At the same time, there’s a certain honest immediacy in following a tangent, and perhaps a certain vulnerability too.
Safaei and Rabieijah are best known for their large installations that translate contemporary gendered and societal concerns, often at a monumental scale. Here, the artists translate themselves. The longtime friends found themselves standing at similar junctures in their lives, as artists and as women both. In these new bodies of work, they trade in their usual medium of sculpture, which involves extended tactile contact and a very manual engagement with the materiality of the object, for a series of experimental approaches to print. What emerges, unfurling luxuriously onto paper like a long-dormant shoot, is a feminized interiority and a sense of connection, both to nature and to the outside world.
In her Body Impressions series, Safaei uses her own body to make marks on textiles. Unlike the full-body prints of Jasper Johns or David Hammons, however, the body is not depicted but only intimated here, with smears and swooshes that might be a shoulder or perhaps a knee; it is unclear. Spidery skeins of dots connect body parts to each other, sometimes trailing off over the page with a tentativeness that directly contrasts with the assertive intensity of these body prints. In Rabieijah’s Spinning Plate series, meanwhile, plants are pressed into paper to leave beautiful deboss-like indentations. Unlike pressed and preserved plants, the botanic matter is then remove and discarded, leaving only the void behind, like a trail of perfume after someone has forever walked away.
About Nastaran Safaei
Sculptor Nastaran Safaei (b. 1984, Tehran) works in multiple mediums including pottery, clay, fiberglass, papier-Mache and various metals. Drawing from Jungian archetypes and ancient Iranian myths, she imbues mundane, objects with her experiences to explore notions of femininity, time, the subconscious, and psychological healing. Her work has been widely exhibited both in Iran and around the world, including shows at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (Iran), Kunstverein Konstanz (Germany), Seokdang Museum of Dong-A (South Korea), and Kunst Zeug Haus (Switzerland).
About Farnaz Rabieijah
Born in 1981 in Tehran, Farnaz Rabieijah studied Biology at Tehran Azad University and graduated with an MSc in Plant Biology from Tehran Payam e Noor University in 2007. These organic, vegetal forms would later find resonance in her sculptural practice, the two main strands of which deal with hearts, figures and letterforms. She has exhibited widely in the region and in Europe, including participations in the 10th Iranian contemporary Ceramics Biennial (2011), Iranian Contemporary Sculpture Biennial (2011). Rabieijah won the “Best Guest” prize of the British Art Medal Society in 2012, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Magic of Persia art prize.
The Mine Gallery: Opening hours: 10:00AM – ۷:۰۰PM| Saturday – Thursday
