Critical reflection 

 

Critically reflecting on last term's work - I was trying to force one painting to do too much. I have now taken a step back and fragmented my practice, like the fragmented nature of my memories. The three core pillars of my practice are:

 

1. The past - in the form of family photographs, ture and untouched (until now)

2. The present - youtube videos of walking tours in Tehran, there is distance here.

3. The past in the present - these are the architectural elements that I reminisce on as the person I am today. More emotive and expressive. I use the duality of the restraints and freedoms I have/find in the two elements above to really find my voice amongst what already exists.

 

“It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.” (De Botton, 2014)

 

18/04/22

 

I think I should be trying to remember things to the best of my knowledge. This idea of the fragments has strayed me from my path. My goal was to recreate these places from my memory as it is all that I have left. The fragments come naturally in the process. I should also celebrate the accuracy, as it is true and it proves my connection and ability. 

 

One of the forms of memory I have of that time are the digital images on mine and my parent's respective hard drives. I will frame and capture these images that float in this cyberspace of numbers and voids. Alongside my imagined buildings, they will act as an access guide to the spaces I am referencing. A book similar to Shahnameh, about my experience of Iran and the story of my family and friends. I will create a game to piece these images and I will tap into my inner architect to reimagine these spaces and places I have lost. My project doesn't have to be grand, but it has to be true to me and what I have set out to do.

 

I want to make Iran accessible to people who may not know a lot about its beauties or have misconceptions. I would like to remind those in a similar position as me of home. I would like to show those in Iran the beauty that I have witnessed and they may forget to see. But, also the loss I feel being apart from there and my family. To say “maybe you shouldn't leave.” But, I know that is selfish because I don't want it to change. … Thinking back, I've experienced so many losses; so many last goodbyes. People leaving and moving to the other side of the world and never seeing them again.

 

What does that do to me? Am I so attached to the places as they were are more permanent and ridged in their existence? Not fleeting like the people who inhabit them. Does the loss of such a solid/“sure” structure feel more painful as there was no need for its demise? That structure could have lasted past my lifetime and it would have been fine. It was murdered along with our collective memories (as Nazgol puts it). I can no longer walk a corner in my Grandmother's house and be reminded of a certain event that I have now misplaced in my brain; as I make new memories and the old ones become hazier. My access is now gone. I have lost my trigger. Now all I can do is think of the space that I imagine would trigger a memory of the event I have lost. 

 

Note to self:

There is a detriment to this thought process as I may subvertly be trying to not gain more memories by focusing on the past. This is the main drive behind my practice!! I am trying to capture these memories so that I know I have them out in the world and I can finally start breathing in the present again. 

 

20/04/22

 

To get this formula right I must stay true to my aesthetic choices while hinting at elements, or one element, that people of the diasporic community and also people still in Iran will instantly recognise and relate to. They will find their own memories from the object while questioning the mystery of the rest of the structure and its relevance and story/purpose 

 

Notes from Anna Bunting-Branch’s Mapping my practice/critical reflection: 

 

 What’s around the edges of my practice?

 

• Connection

• Separation

• Distance

• Loneliness

• Fear

• Archiving

• Games

• Dual nationality

• Youtube addiction

• Hoarding 

• Essense 

 

Forest - Theoretical and critical/political context network of ideas/events/other phenomena: 

 

• The development boom in Tehran - loss of collective memory 

• The Architecture of Happiness, Alain De Botton - looking at the psychology of architecture.

• The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard 

• The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny, Dylan Trigg - Especially everything he says in the first chapter.  

• Memories of a place that no longer exists (Hiraeth)

• Challenging the media’s portrayal of Iran

• The stories told through Persian miniatures

• Nazgol Ansarina’s research

• Tala Madani’s use of paint as a metaphor 

• Wilhelm Sensal’s fast paintings of the world he engages with in the everyday

• Pictures floating on a hard drive - I took the Creative Coding Course to help me better understand this wizardry. I’m still amazed at how a photo can become a number and then a number become a photo again. 

• The 4th Dimension 

 

Base - Material practice, disciplines process and technologies: 

 

• Old family photos (digital)

• Stitching images together to try and reconnect them

• The photo album

• Frames that give me a sense of hiraeth 

• Rock (for colours and shading)

• Line sketches (of structural memories)

• Creative writing (expression through poetry)

• Architectural Drawings

• Paint peels

• The process of remembering, observing thoughts and flashbacks 

• Speed painting from videos of Tehran. 

• Projection 

 

Mountain - Big aspirations, aims and ambitions philosophy/ideology

 

• Give access to those who have none to Iran on a personal level and challenge their views to lead by the media

• Create work that is nostalgic and sentimental for those of the middle eastern diaspora

• Create work for me that I can treasure, so I can celebrate those spaces I have lost

• Show my friends and family how much those moments mean to me and how much I think of them despite not messaging or talking to them.

 

Path - What's reeling from the base to the mountain… this is my research question

 

• How can I capture these memories in their 4D form?

• How can I create a visual language that represents my Iranian culture but is true to who I am in this context?

• How can I change someone's perspective -> challenge the propaganda, show the human and leave the politics? 

 

Meadow - artists/ researcher / writers / close contemporaries, practices i can touch

 

• Nazgol Ansarinia

• Lauren from sculpture

• Ali Alizadeh (my cousin the author) 

• My dad (the architect)

• Tala Madani

• Rachel Whitereed - The ghost of the house

• Do Ho Suh - tracing his dwellings - obsessive nature that I can relate to. 

 

Sky - figures in the sky that guide my work from afar

 

• The Production of Space, Lefebvre 

• Persian poets

• Hermenn Hess, Siddhartha - We are all molecules in a river, each individual fleeting but connected and necessary to the flow of it. This is grounding 

• Persian miniatures

• Gaudi

• Dali

• Picasso 

• Duchamp 

 

Climate - Take a step back… How this research feels, what is the quality of my practice and how may it feel to others:

 

• It feels quite serious

• Emotional and provocative

• Soft and personal

• Dreamy and nostalgic - maybe like a warm summer breeze

• It feels quite draining but also therapeutic 

• Reawakening

• I want it to feel thought-provoking to those who don’t know (Iran) and warm and relatable for those who do. 

• Comment on how alike we all are and how rapid change in our cities and life affects us all. 

 

The Pillars of my practice: 

 

1. Framing the past 

 

I always think it's interesting how when you take a step back from a window the view becomes more focused. Focused, as in, the composition is more cropped. The windows from the building across the road are somehow closer the further I step back from the window in my kitchen. I can see them more clearly with distance. The same can be said with memories of place. As Do Ho Suh says in his interview on the “A brush with…” podcast: you only start to get a sense of home when you have left home (Luke and Suh, 2021).
 

The frames and family pictures are the concrete starts to my recollection process. They integrate a sense of a collective past with my own personal history. I am still representing my present aesthetic choices/personality through the documentation of my childhood. This is something that will evolve with me. Linking the frames, which give me a sense of hiraith, to the images of the time I am trying to capture. Each photograph is one still frame in time. I paint from these photographs and contain them again into frames. I also celebrate the frames that gave me the parameters for expression. I then stitch the photo’s influenced by the frames back together in the form of a photo album, as I don’t want these images to be separated from each other. This act of stitching is therapeutically soothing. Knowing that I have transferred these digital images that float in the void into an object where they all coexist together. I guess the void in the hard drive could be likened to the void (the wall) in between the physical photo frames. I present the paintings in the photo album like the windows and rooms in the Persian Miniature paintings. Allowing different stories to be told on one “plane”. Unlike the flatness of the Persian Miniatures where one plane is 2D, my plane is now 3D. I have removed the noise that is usually surrounding the windows and rooms that hold the narrative of the stories painted in the Persian miniature and instead allow them to live separately from the photo album. Fragmenting once again.     

 

Previously I have been asked why I don't include the faces of my relatives when I paint them. And I said it is to respect their privacy, but also to open the image for interpretation for people to see themselves and their families in it. Especially for English people who would look and find commonalities before they realise I am referencing Iran. After writing and reflecting on the poem I wrote for the Cha publication, I have realised that this desire and urge comes from the racism I have felt growing up in this country. It’s my own small form of activism. However, now that I have created this more private space for my paintings to live and be experienced in, I feel more comfortable giving more information about the subjects I am painting. It would be rude to display them so rawly on a gallery wall. 

 

Pillar 1 is like a mirror held to the past. A clear depiction of what I am referencing. Captured in a frame. I plan on projecting old family films from the '70s and the '00s onto the frames and seeing what they capture of the image that has travelled through air to reach the surface of the wall. 

 

2. Capturing the present 

 

The walking videos are my connection from a distance, My connection through the screen Painting them loosens my hand and allows me to become less precious. They activate memories and help me reminisce - similar to the photos - whilst also freeing myself from the personal connection I have to what I am painting. Here I am trying to represent the more current conditions by using more iconic imagery to trigger a sense of place for people that are outside of my head.

 

Painting from the videos - fleeting moments that I rush to capture, constantly chasing the last frame while accepting to let go and move on to the next one. Layering and destroying what’s underneath. This is all metaphorical of what’s happening due to the development boom and also what’s happening to my brain as I grow older. Like Tala Madani has to allow the paint to be paint, in my practice I do this exercise as a meditation to bring me back to the present by loosening my grip on each frame. This method of painting reminds me of the ending of the book Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse When Siddhartha returns to the man who lives by the river:

 

“The image of his father, his own image, the image of his son merged, Kamala's image also appeared and was dispersed, and the image of Govinda, and other images, and they merged with each other, turned all into the river, headed all, being the river, for the goal, longing, desiring, suffering, and the river's voice sounded full of yearning, full of burning woe, full of unsatisfiable desire. For the goal, the river was heading, Siddhartha saw it hurrying, the river, which consisted of him and his loved ones and of all people, he had ever seen, all of these waves and waters were hurrying, suffering, towards goals, many goals, the waterfall, the lake, the rapids, the sea, and all goals were reached, and every goal was followed by a new one, and the water turned into vapour and rose to the sky, turned into rain and poured down from the sky, turned into a source, a stream, a river, headed forward once again, flowed on once again. But the longing voice had changed. It still resounded, full of suffering, searching, but other voices joined it, voices of joy and of suffering, good and bad voices, laughing and sad ones, a hundred voices, a thousand voices.

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… Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the happy ones from the weeping ones, not the ones of children from those of men, they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life.”  (Hesse, 2008) 

 

3. Connecting my past to my present 

 

I’ve got to do me. This portion of my practice is what I set out to do initially, but I realised it was not possible without the support of the other two pillars. Perhaps, I wasn’t giving the other two enough space - to take them seriously. I really try here to merge the past and the present. Using memories of the spaces I set out to capture the essence of these lost structures. The paint peel adds another layer to this: both holding the past use of the paint while celebrating its current dry form. The 3D element creates a new dimension to the work.

 

The buildings I sketch from my memory/imagination are me trying to make sense of it all. I’m still developing this language and as I work more on the 2 paths above. Combining motifs from both, but, mainly drawing from architectural spaces that were not substantially documented to show what I am missing and focusing on the transient spaces - the places of connection - the stairs, the hallway, and the space between 2 windows. Focusing on the sense of connection between spaces. What I both feel strongly connected to and what to me showed a strong sense of connection in the past. If time is the 4th dimension, a 4-dimensional being can look at a 3-dimensional one and see its lifespan all at once. Combining my present self with my visions of these past places is similar to creating a sense of Interdimensional-ity for me. 

 

I am combining the present through rocks to these structures that no longer exist, which are now rubble and rocks themselves.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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De Botton, A., 2014. Architecture of happiness, the. 3rd ed. London: Penguin Books Ltd.

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Hesse, H., 2008. Siddhartha. Boston: MobileReference.com, p.138.

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