In Bologna, four Iranian women artists in a group show for a gesture of rebellion from oppression

On the occasion of ArteFiera, at Palazzo Fava, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni of Genus Bononiae is hosting from Feb. 2 to 5, 2023, the group show Voci dall’abisso. Four Iranian Women Artists in Bologna, curated by Marco Baldassari. The exhibition is meant to be an urgent and unavoidable creative response to the tragic events of recent months in Iran, but also a gesture of rebellion against an oppression that has distant roots, presenting the work of Pegah Pasyar, Reyhaneh Alikhani, Golzar Sanganian and Khorshid Pouyan. Four young Iranian women artists whose paths intertwined at theAcademy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where they graduated, in the city where, exiles in spite of themselves, they found the opportunity to pursue their own research.

In the group show the individual personalities of the artists emerge, declined in works made in the most diverse forms, from oil painting to sculpture, from graphics to installations, from the reuse of materials to the recovery of the very ancient kilim weaving technique. Persian culture is strongly present in the works, both in the technical methods and in the poetics underlying them, strongly pervaded by feelings of freedom, love, suffering, and belonging.

In Pegah Pasyar’s work, the call for freedom is symbolically represented by the mirrors that form the basis of the sculptures made of papier-mâché and clay, the image of which is reflected, symbolically, to infinity: the whites arise from the synthesis of all the colors of the spectrum, just as their form is a synthesis of the human figure. Visual memory runs to the sculpture of the Veiled Christ by Giuseppe Sanmartino in Naples and the purity of forms by Constantin Brancusi. The infinite returns in the series of small oil-on-paper works Skyning and Routing, an homage to Constable’s skies, also with the dilation of space between paint and mirrors. The gilded terracotta figures represent the body in the experience of being a woman. Finally, delicate drawings of nudes using the monoprint technique on old papers dialogue with the gold sculptures, evoking free forms in the relationships between bodies.

Reyhaneh Alikhani recovers the very ancient technique of kilim carpets, dating back a thousand years before Christ, to actualize its message, using contemporary working tools and references to 20th-century art, in a slow embroidery on pre-constituted forms that transforms the objects used, as in the series Signs of Resistance, in which historical cutting tools are denied their functionality with a textile intervention that neutralizes the blades and restores different traces of memory to the eye. In the series Trame, saws from destructive tools become looms of wool weaving, representing in its warp the pomegranate tree, symbol of life. The virginity evoked in the pair Pure Plots compares the repressive culture in the East with the democratic culture in the West.

Nature is the driving force behind the creation of Golzar Sanganian’s work, with the forms found in it finding new life in his compositions. The installation The road to freedom is, contrary to what the title suggests, a dead-end street: the model car becomes, metaphorically, the life that finds no outlet anywhere, remaining locked in its path. In the series Emerse, seaweed finds new life in a new space after the sea has rejected it, while Naufragio symbolizes the resilience of the wounded body, the ability to find new strength and resistance after a fall. The natural elements represent, for the artist, the call to the homeland, which carries with it the lacerating reality of a denied bond.

Finally, Khorsid Pouyan works on human figures, through which the artist creates an attunement with the environment by inserting perceptual elements that vary by shifting the point of observation. The representation of emptiness is the main element of his research: in the work Beyond Nothingness Pouyan creates the illusion of an opening in the wall that, by dematerializing, projects us into the open and eternal empty space of a blue sky without beginning or end, openings reminiscent of Sol Lewitt’s art. In Losing Pieces, too, the research focuses between the void, which gains importance, and the fullness of the female body. The large nude figures in the In_quiet series, bathed in the whiteness of wool, are in search of balance amid daily distractions.

“Art is a means of expression and communication innate to the human being. Even more so for these women artists, the desire to communicate becomes an urgency,” commented Filippo Sassoli de’ Bianchi, President of Genus Bononiae. “We have witnessed in the last few months a great number of events, happenings, and performances aimed at bringing attention to the situation in Iran, but this is the first time that Italy is hosting a group show of Iranian women artists, and as a cultural institution we are happy to give them a voice and space. We believe it is an important message and one that should not be forgotten even and especially during the days of ArteFiera, during which Bologna becomes the capital of contemporary art.”

Hours: Thursday, Feb. 2 from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. (last entry at 8 p.m.)
Friday, Feb. 3 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. (last entry at 6 p.m.)
Saturday, Feb. 4 from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. (last admission at 10 p.m.)
Sunday, February 5 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. (last admission at 6 p.m.)

Free Admission

Image: Reyhaneh Alikhani, Kilim woven textures on saw.

In Bologna, four Iranian women artists in a group show for a gesture of rebellion from oppression

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