Aseman Orae Iranian contemporary artist brings her existence to gallery
Iranian contemporary art and artists, Sculpture and installation art
By Maryam Roshanfekr
Personification
In literature, giving personality to Objects is called personification. Objects who start to “exist” and start living their lives.
After a long silence, Aseman Orae brings her made up creatures to light and starts to tell their story. Her story is related to maternity, family and home, where everything gets softened and quietude, that is protected by endless cycle of routines. Women are the creator, mother and the heart of this cycle, they create life in houses and take care of it by a silent patient heart full of unsaid.
Personification has a great place in Iranian literature, though it is perfect for authors to disguise their thoughts, the one’s that can’t be told. Aseman did the same. She has been gathered all her silence, during the years and little by little gave life to the objects around her and made them her envoy of reticence.
Books, reading and literature with all the pleasantry feelings in it, pans, forks and spoons, vacuum cleaner and etc., all have taken the duty to bring us her message of the long patience and effort to keep the family wheel rounding well, but there is a doubt in it, a one which comes out as disquietude and despondency.
Her works are divided in to two parts, during their evolution; that could be called her realities and her dreams.
Realities are depicted in the works that showing the signs of objection, scream and despair. Her planet of objects in reality is rather vain or maddened her. A table set installation, an upside down wheel made of pans, the vacuum cleaner, the bicycle and the female torso smashed on a pillow.
She conveys the results of realities of her life in this group of works. Her detection in this series is contained of sorrows, angers and facing incompetency. She uses all the furniture of a normal house to represent the hidden concept behind them, a sense of disappointment of useless cycles.
In a symbolic work Aseman made a bicycle with an extra chain that meant to simplify its cycling but turns out to be restrictive for the object which hasn’t got the ability to move, in the first place. She reproduced this deformed inventory creatures with pointless and disabled limbs in another work which is a vacuum cleaner. She illuminates how this monstrous organs grew on long passed bodies by installing the vacuum cleaner with some extra flexible hoses grew like branches from its body in a water box, like she is taunting herself about all her restless efforts.
This taunting becomes loud in another work by the title of ” I the dash line myself” that an upside downed dining table is shown while the plates and all the forks and spoons are flying in the air, but only one set is still stick to the table on the roof, the only simple plate which hasn’t got the silent cry in the other’s, that pictured in faces coming out of the plate. This plates show a placid scream that is floating in the air.
The Other side of her work is Dream. She considers the dreams as something free of the ennui and hopelessness that appeared in reality, and gives it a humorous side. Her dream is more bright and more light, even though it is compressed, imprisoned and has been assaulted, but it always find a way through and up to the liberty.Her dream is exhibited with some special objects and their incarnation: forks and spoons in one hand and books and tools in the other hand.
The most melodious and exhilarating works of this series is the statue made of spoons and forks dancing like galaxies made of glittering steel, that once act as a black hole or a group of ants who are swallow everything around; One yellow shoe as a metaphor for leaving or a desk lamp that is taken as spoil to unknown destination. The floating and free nature of this masses with hollow and light forms, comes with a sense of music that is conducted by the artist.
On the other side are the books. The sculptures which are made of books. A mass of books that are threatened or damaged by rough iron tools.She makes a cloud out of paper floating on top of a column of books going through the ceiling, and by that her love for books and levitation of thoughts or its ability to overfly it to the sky is been represented.
In both series, the dream has been started from the earth and going up to the sky, or trying to reach it. In all works Aseman has been presented till now, she managed to project her concerns on objects. Her objects therefore have got a humanoid existence and personality to play a role in her life scene, and during the path of examining between dream and reality, guide her to a revelation about living.
As well as she personify the objects and use them to express herself, she do not want to empties them from their original functions. But this is the function itself which is under her questioning. Function of human being that loses oneself to surrounding objects and find his reality and dream in them. The human that is alienated from himself. His desire is buried deeper every day under what is surrounded him. Aseman Orae’s act in this series is on acceptance. She is trying to embrace what is besieged her and find a way out, therefore her works contain no stand or glass box, they are bare and pure, they left their artistic arrogance in order to make the chance to help the artist comes out of “new existence”‘s web and enable her to moderate her current position.
