February 9 Chelsea 3 – 4:30pm
Azadeh Fatehrad presents:
Pine Tree, 2010, installation, dimensions variable
This work began as a response to my country’s current situation.
Recently, I watched an interview of an Iranian actress who said, “The Middle East is beautiful, but looks black now - dangerous now.”
My recent installation shows the happiness that has been forgotten in my country.
The pine tree has been wrapped-up like a dead body, turned, like a dead pine tree - from its vertical natural state to a horizontal position, and attached to the wall.
The tree is accompanied by five prints each are 16th Century historical paintings depicting Iranian celebration parties. In the background of these images are pine trees and, in my county, the pine tree symbolises creativity, life, longevity and immortality. These happy and celebratory images reflect the sublime, artistic ideals and ethical ideas of the people from central Asia and the Middle East.
The prints are covered with handprints of black paint. It is an Iranian tradition that when someone dies we make handprints in red, but here, I chose to use black.
To the left of the prints are five paintings wrapped in black glossy paper which present the 20th and 21st Century. It is true, Iran looks black today.
On the floor of the installation are written words in black paint. Before I made the installation, I sent a video link of Iran http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmVvKRm9JdU to my classmates and asked them to come up with five words to describe what they had seen. From their responses, there were no words like “black.” Instead, everything they gave were words like, “beautiful” and “happy.” I then wrote the words they gave to me on the floor of the installation.
One can walk through the installation and as one does, they can’t help but walk on top of words like “beautiful,” “green” and “clear” and thereby further defacing and making invalid the painted words on the ground.
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