Golnar Adili: Found in Translation: A Story of Language, Play, and a Personal Archive

About

Adili’s work is a formal investigation of language, spanning 14th century Persian poetry, didactic Iranian texts, and the artist’s own family archives. Featuring artist books, photographic and textual prints, and an installation of modular wooden sculptures, the exhibition embodies a multidisciplinary exploration of diasporic identity.

Born in Virginia, Adili migrated with her family to Tehran as a young child in 1979 in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. Her father, a leftist writer and activist, was forced into exile soon after their arrival, and eventually escaped back to the U.S. in 1981. Adili remained in Iran with her mother, whose multiple attempts at immigration were unsuccessful. Forced to live apart for many years, they kept in touch through letters and photographs sent back and forth – materials that now make up a vast archive of separation and longing. By reactivating these materials in layered prints and artist books, Adili transforms distilled memories into living artworks.

In She Feels Your Absence Deeply, a portfolio box unfolds to reveal a set of wooden cubes printed with images from the archive: the artist as a child with her father, her mother’s passport, a pink letter from one parent to another. As the blocks are flipped and moved around, the images fragment into mix-matched pieces. Inspired by children’s puzzle books, the work invites a return to – and reimagining – of play.

This tactile playfulness is echoed in Adili’s floor installation in the main gallery space, where verb pairings from a 14th century Persian poem come to life in an undulating landscape of wooden blocks. The poem, “Samanbouyan,” written by the lyric poet Hafez, is a recurring point of departure in Adili’s work. She is particularly occupied by the first verb pairing, benshinand and benshaanand, meaning “to sit” and “to seat.” Repeating throughout “Sambouyan,” verb pairings serve as the central structure for the poem. Each pair is similar in form, but often contradictory in meaning – a tension that Adili makes tangible through iterative material explorations. In the graphite drawing Sambouyan, Adili’s first piece investigating the poem, the opening verse is transcribed in a pixelated typography. As the verse reaches its end, the verbs repeat, cascading down in criss-crossing columns. The resulting hourglass shape serves as a model for Adili’s installation at CUE, which translates the rhythm of language into a spatial experience.

A striking image of eyes, belonging to the artist’s mother, stares back at us from multiple pieces throughout the gallery: printed into gridded fragments on toy wooden blocks, or interwoven with an image of the artist’s chest. As Beasley writes in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, “the biographical current within each image, script, or form maintains its autonomy as a lived experience, point of departure, and memory of her own body – all while being opened up, revealed, and transformed. The unfolding of a puzzle is not just a metaphor for the unfolding of a memory, but is in its own right the revealing of a shared language within ourselves. The modularity of form possessed by Adili’s objects captivate the imagination and perpetuate a curiosity about who we are, where have we come from, and where are we going.”