Studio Visit

Constant Shift:

The Art of Tannaz Farsi

By Bean Gilsdorf

Tannaz Farsi's practice embraces flux. In her studio, all materials are fair game, context is everything, and ideas aren't fixed. Over a video chat, she tells me, "I'm interested in how objects talk to each other. And sometimes I don't know exactly what the endpoint [of a work] is...I like to call them states. Three or four years later, I'll revisit a piece and remake it, and I might come to a different conclusion." On the floor and walls behind her are an in-progress metal sculpture, two Jacquard-woven tapestries, large handwritten and screenprinted works, and a smattering of notes that testify to her process.

Farsi's work draws from a wide range of artistic traditions such as ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and writing. But her initial path to artmaking was not direct or easy. Her family came to the United States in 1985, when the artist was twelve, to escape the political and social fallout from the Iranian revolution. The rupture was necessary, but swift and shocking: "I didn't understand that we were moving. We just left with our suitcases and never went back." The trauma of her family's sudden immigration alongside the normal upheavals of adolescence compounded Farsi's sense of displacement; her teen years in Philadelphia threatened to engulf her, but then a transfer to Cheltenham High School brought her to the beginnings of solace. Her new school had a strong art program, and Farsi was introduced to a community that cared about art and artmaking beyond the obligatory annual trip to the Philadelphia Art Museum. Still, she had a difficult time envisioning a place for herself in the dominant paradigms of American culture. "I didn't understand how I fit. So much of that has to do with coming to this country at that age and not really knowing the way things work. I couldn't imagine myself getting an education or a job or getting married, I couldn't imagine any of those potentials in my life." In the end, what shifted her perspective was an introduction to ceramics and functional ware, the repetitive practice of working with her hands, watching herself begin to master basic skills with clay: "Making things out of clay and really seeing myself learn opened up a lot of doors for how I wanted to think and be in the world." In 2004, she earned her BFA from West Virginia University, and in 2007 she completed her MFA at the University of Ohio. After graduation, she accepted a one-year visiting faculty position in the department of art at the University of Oregon, where she has been teaching ever since.

This early affiliation with craft informs her art practice, and she thinks of it more as a connection to people and ways of thinking than an attachment to use or design. "My beginnings as an artist are based in community and craft. I just loved going to the studio every day, thinking about what constitutes skill or deep looking or engagement. Craft allows you to think about artistic production, aesthetic production, and how it links to cultural stories and cultural histories." For the last fifteen years, Farsi has been engaging with ideas about collective memory and how history is told. In her artist statement, she describes her object-making as "alternative methods of remembering and recording," and she frequently reworks and combines familiar objects so that they take on new significance. For example, her 2019 sculpture Tyranny Stops Life is an Iranian rug, rolled up as though for shipping and folded at one end. The folded end is bound with an aluminum sheet printed with an image of the artist's hand. In front of this, silica grit on the floor spells out the words from the title in Farsi. This text is part of a letter written by the imprisoned Iranian journalist and human-rights activist Narges Mohammadi, and rather than translating the words into English, the artist preserved the original Farsi language to maintain identity and avoid erasure. When I ask Farsi if she divides her personal life from her political life, she tells me, "The things I think about in the studio, my political engagement through art, have everything to do with my personal experience. My life in Iran was full of fear because there was a war going on. That became the framework for understanding my own body as politicized. And my experience with war and immigration is not singular; it is also a reflection of other people's experiences." The near-universality of some of her materials—often readymades altered and combined with other readymades—is a way of communicating the commonalities of her experience. In her recent exhibition at Holding Contemporary in Portland, Oregon, Farsi included sculptures constructed from unremarkable but evocative objects: Second Skin (2020) is comprised of a cut, blasted, sanded, and dragged American-flag shirt that's hung from a steel pole leaning against the wall; over this assemblage, an industrial-looking security light beams down; the cotton "remainder" (the fluff and threads from the battered shirt) is gathered at the base of the pole. The beige cord that powers the light is coiled messily on the wall and floor, adding to the provisional, precarious air of the other elements. In Visceral Language (2020), four uncapped bottles of rosewater sit on a low concrete block that's topped by a thin piece of polished aluminum. The block is both plinth and wall, simultaneously pointing to its rarified place in the gallery and its ubiquity as a material that protects and divides. These objects hint at Farsi's own experience as a member of the Middle Eastern diaspora, but their symbolic values also point to various other histories.

Sculpture and installation take up space, of course, and it is tempting to read far too much into this mode of practice as especially fitting for a woman who initially struggled to assume a place for herself in the world. But Farsi laughs, "Sculpture is so unruly! It doesn't fit neatly, and so there's always something at stake because of that." And while Farsi's work does take up space, it's often ephemeral in scope; the sightlines may take up a lot of area, but the objects do not necessarily contain mass or take up a lot of volume. Farsi calls this "perceptual space, sensory space rather than strictly physical space," and talks about her interest in formal maneuvers that keep the viewer in tension between wanting to stand back and take the whole thing in versus coming closer to inspect the details of a work. Lately, she has been thinking about installation and how other cultures have engaged these ideas of a decentered experience in places of worship like mosques.

When our conversation turns to the artist's use of language—another way of defining a conceptual parameter while maintaining space for personal understanding—Farsi talks about Jean Baudrillard's book Passwords and how a word generates the conditions around it. When she was a young ceramicist, Farsi wrote stream-of-consciousness text on her wares; now she often makes lists of correlated words as a way of opening language up. The large handwritten words of The Measure I (2020; screenprint and graphite on paper) begin: "Standard Quality Condition Infection Complaint Objection Opposition Battle Contest Race Origin Basis Condition Order System Structure Arrangement Deal..." The text flows through a set of associations that transform and shift as each word responds to the one that preceded it. In this way, it builds additively toward meaning without ever reaching a fixed conclusion. It is as if the paper ends, but the viewer/reader can continue the undertaking in their own mind.

Farsi's pathways among cultures, languages, and materials offer her viewers glimpses into her personal history as well as universal concerns. The shifting subtexts within each work touch on her own political orientation without the rigidity or didacticism of straightforward autobiography. By pulling fragments from various traditions and lineages of making, the artist offers something generous: a space for exploration and connection. Like her sculptures that occupy space without the grandiosity of mass, she outlines the conditions of experience but prescribes no definitive, singular understanding. 

Bean Gilsdorf is an artist and writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her recent solo projects have been exhibited at Stroboskop Gallery (Warsaw), the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grantee.