THE IMPACT OF TANGENCY
Nastaran Safaei & Farnaz Rabiej
9 MAR - 25 APR 2017
The Impact of Tangency was 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 point of contact is small enough 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 when an object, any object, touches a curve as a distraction, as a kind of veering off course. At the same time, there’s an honest immediacy in following a tangent, and perhaps a vulnerability too.
Safaei and Rabieijah are best known for their large installations that translate contemporary concerns about gender and society, often at a monumental scale. Here, the artists translated themselves. The longtime friends found themselves standing at similar junctures in their lives, both as artists and as women. In this body of work, they traded in their usual medium of sculpture, which involves extended tactile contact and manual engagement with the materiality of the object, for a series of experimental approaches to print. What emerged, unfurling luxuriously onto paper like a long-dormant shoot, was 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. But unlike pressed and preserved plants, the botanic matter is removed and discarded, leaving only the void behind, like a trail of perfume after someone who has forever walked away.
Nastaran Safaei
Beginning her journey back in 2000, as a self-taught sculptor while experimenting with pottery and clay, Nastaran Safaei made a turn in her career by attending Parviz Tanavoli’s first series of sculpting workshops in 2006. The workshops had a focus on the bronze technique, which resulted in her first solo sculpture exhibition at Assar Art Gallery in Tehran, Iran. The successful show made her a member of the Association of Iranian Sculptors. Since then, Safaei has participated in a large number of residency programs and exhibitions worldwide.
Farnaz Rabieijah
Farnaz Rabieijah (1981) is an Iranian-born and based artist. She grew up in a half-artistic, half-scientific family, a fact that explains how she has been academically trained as a biologist (botanist) while attending various art courses under leading Iranian contemporary artists, including Parviz Tanavoli, Abbas Kiarostami, Maryam Salour and Arab’ali Sherveh. This extensive training gradually allowed her to skillfully tackle various media, including metal (bronze, iron, and brass), ceramics, fabric, and fiberglass.