Haines Gallery is presenting Burning Song, a solo exhibition by Iranian American artist Shiva Ahmadi (CRF 2018). Ahmadi draws from the artistic traditions of the Middle East to reflect on contemporary geopolitical tensions. Featuring a new body of work that is at once humorous, scathing, and heartbreaking, Burning Song is Ahmadi’s response to a world in turmoil.
Working across a variety of media that includes painting, digital animation, and sculpture, Ahmadi addresses the machinations of despotic regimes (and the complicity of their drone-like followers), the horrors of war, and their effects on innocent lives—using beauty to seduce the viewer into her exquisitely crafted scenes. The vibrant fantasy realms in Ahmadi’s works are, upon closer inspection, macabre theaters of conflict. The artist appropriates and subverts imagery derived from Persian and Indian miniature paintings, which traditionally depict courtly scenes, mythological epics, and the heroic feats of rulers. By contrast, in Ahmadi’s works, figures are faceless, bloodied, and enchained, linked together in endless cycles of violence. Headless horses drag chariots of fire and rubble. Overlaying washes of atmospheric watercolor with precisely applied inks and acrylic paint, Ahmadi conjures a world where fortified walls open to reveal not palaces, but oil refineries and nuclear power plants—allusions to modern seats of power.
Since 2015, Ahmadi has been concerned with the escalating refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe and, more recently, the plight of detainees at the US-Mexico Border. Having come to the US from Iran in 1998, the immigrant experience is one that she is keenly aware of and sympathetic to. In a nod to the perpetual state of uncertainty that so many people are now experiencing, her new works see an growing tendency towards abstraction, with figures
and scenes that are suggestive rather than descriptive. Tightly controlled tableaux are increasingly destabilized, with floating masses of rubble and viscera that suggest the aftermath of an explosion, the scattered pieces of what was once whole. Flying Carpet (2018), for
example, depicts an ornate Persian rug, burning as onlookers point and pick. Such carpets are objects of cultural and historical significance in Iranian homes; throughout the exhibition, Ahmadi’s paintings speak to the anxiety of dislocation and the insecurities that arise
when crossing into unfamiliar (and sometimes unwelcoming) lands.
September 6 – October 27, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 6, 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm