Exhibition
Shahrzad Changalvaee: In Absentia, In Effigie
18 Jan 2019 – 24 Feb 2019
Address
- 200 Morgan Avenue
- New York
New York - 11237
- United States
The Chimney is pleased to present “In Absentia, In Effigie”, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based Iranian artist Shahrzad Changalvaee.
About
Inside the gallery, visitors are invited to meander over a pond to discover floating images and fragments of lost stories within the multiple quadrants. Overlooking the undulating reservoir, a printer produces new images throughout the exhibition.
The Chimney is transformed into a landscape - one that simultaneously evokes familiarity and intimacy, distance and the uncanny, local and popular views as well as left-out visions that the artist closely remembers. Changalvaee accumulates found images and places them alongside her personal photographs to re-link and cure internet fluxes, personal experiences and local stories. Images from different histories, events, and cultures coexist within an abstract framing to challenge established narratives and one’s alienation towards media, information and knowledge. Hands and bodies of authorities are juxtaposed with chaotic urban events, bricks, sunset skies, tools, studio material and historical illustrations. Political glimpses of protestors, artists, workers intermingle with Iranian folkloric imagery, drawings and nature’s landscape. Persian typography lies next to decontextualized English sentences. “Fix this problem” reads a forgotten note – an urgent request that has however lost its original narrative.
By working with specific details, Changalvaee reclaims authority over information and memory, and attempts to reveal within viewers impressions that evade words’ marginalizing effect. Within the stream of water, these images, whether historical, personal, imaginary, are all summoned to the same space, sitting on the same page. These drifting images land in the stream of water with a sincere intention of ‘making’ while inevitably adding to the addling reservoir.
These visual stories are constructed by the uncontrollable and unpredictable element of water and remain subject to an inexorable factor: motion. Where fiction meets history, various systems coalesce, movement sculpts narratives and simultaneously splinters them within a perpetual flow.
