Gallery Two
Always In My Heart is an exhibition of works by Morehshin Allahyari, Hangama Amiri, and Fatemeh Kazemi, that explores the artists’ shared inquiry into popular visual and textual idioms of love, desire, and intimacy in each of their respective identity positions. Curated by Muheb Esmat in conjunction with Aziz Hazara’s solo exhibition in Gallery One, Always In My Heart brings together textiles, drawings, printed matter, and a web-based project that highlight how pop-culture idioms fall short of expressing all of what the heart can hold. The widely circulated personal and commercial expressions that appear in the artists’ works, though often seen as banal, offer vehicles for understanding the gendered limitations that underlie their formation. By highlighting the voids in these visual languages, they offer a metric for that which is left unexpressed.
In Allahyari’s web-based work Like Pearls (2014), from where the exhibition takes its title, the artist presents a glittery mashup of GIFs, heavily censored images of models, and textual idioms collected from Farsi email spam for online lingerie stores in Iran. Playing the Backstreet Boys’ hit “I Want It That Way” softly in the background, this installation prompts viewers to click through an animated digital collage, generating spam-like pop-up windows and revealing snippets of marketing language that caters to a generic masculine viewpoint–the clientele imagined by these online stores. Allahyari’s work is a case study of the persistent objectification of women’s bodies across digital spaces in service of male desire, as well as the patriarchal norms bound to common sentiments of love and desire that are in high circulation.
Hangama Amiri’s When I Am With You (2021) is an intricately sewn textile that combines a Farsi poem of love and endearment with a weeping eye, red lips, and three postcards of Bollywood film stars at the corners. Amiri’s work reproduces common tropes of romance and intimacy, reminiscent of the diaries of high school lovers. Here, poetic symbolism and Bollywood stars serve as a vehicle for smuggling in expressions of love and desire, subtly subverting the social and cultural norms that restrict this gendered language from a female-centric perspective in Afghanistan. The prevalence of these foreign stars is both an ode to the enormous presence Bollywood films have in the country and a reflection of lingering social anxieties that prevent the creation of a nuanced and inclusive language of romance.
In Despair and Die (2021), Fatemeh Kazemi constructs an intimate space for processing grief. Central to the installation is a book that chronicles the lamentation of a heavy heart through a fragmented narrative assembled from common Farsi idioms, drawings, and photographs sourced from family archives and found online. This installation builds on Kazemi’s practice of exploring the aesthetics of everyday life found in trivial and marginalized spaces and expressions. By employing these visual and symbolic representations of grief, the artist actively questions tired cliches–often used to express universal emotions–for the limits of what they are able to declare.
Always In My Heart is part of the newly launched Close Readings series, and is guest-curated by Muheb Esmat in conjunction with Aziz Hazara, It’s Only Sound That Remains. Close Readings presents a new commission by one under-recognized, early, or mid-career artist in Gallery One, along with an accompanying exhibition in Gallery Two that uses the central commission as a curatorial framework. This program extends our support for interdisciplinary artists by building conversations around their practices in addition to facilitating the realization of ambitious, site-specific projects. This pairing of exhibitions, guest curated by Muheb Esmat, centers the artists’ investigations of the complex and manifold matters of everyday life as experienced in their home countries. It’s Only Sound That Remains and Always In My Heart both explore the root sources and common language available for understanding the contemporary moment in its immeasurable diversity and ever-changing status.
Bios:
Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: موره شین اللهیاری), is a NY based Iranian-Kurdish artist using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa). Her work has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops at venues throughout the world, including the New Museum, MoMa, Centre Pompidou, Venice Biennale di Archittectura, and Museum für Angewandte Kunst among many others. She is the recipient of The United States Artist Fellowship (2021), The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019), The Sundance Institute New Frontier International Fellowship (2019), and the Leading Global Thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine. Her artworks are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Current Museum. She has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Wired, National Public Radio, Parkett Art Magazine, Frieze, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, and Al Jazeera, among others.
Hangama Amiri هنگامه امیری (b. 1989, Kabul, Afghanistan) holds an MFA from Yale University where she graduated in 2020 from the Painting and Printmaking Department. She received her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences (2015-2016). Her recent exhibitions include Henna Night/ Shabe Kheena (2022) at David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, CO; Mirrors and Faces (2021) at Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto, ON; Wandering Amidst the Colors (2021) at Albertz Benda, New York, NY; Spectators of a New Dawn, Towards Gallery, Toronto, ON; Bazaar: A Recollection of Home at T293 Gallery, Rome, Italy, and Reminiscences at Union Pacific gallery in London, UK. Her upcoming solo institution exhibitions will open respectively in February 2023 at Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT.
Fatemeh Kazemi فاطمه کاظمی (b. 1992, Tehran) is a Syracuse-Based artist and Co-Founder of ROSVAÂ Magazine, pursuing her practice in multidisciplinary arenas to merge her different interests in different projects. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Painting at the University of Tehran. Recently, she is studying for a Master of Fine Art in Studio Art at Syracuse University.
Fatemeh’s approach is focused on the process and context of creation, to spotlight the very period during which the work was built. She employs an amalgamation of media such as video, installation, writing, and performance that serve as research into themes of ritual, subculture, and archival memory. Fatemeh uses a multitude of sources as a starting point, from theoretical text to a new word or memory, to weave together.
Image:
Left to right: Morehshin Allahyari, Like Pearls, 2014, web-based project, dimensions variable; Hangama Amiri, When I Am With You, 2021, inkjet print on silk, canvas, and embroidery on satin, 28 x 22 inches, Private Collection, Kelly and Adam Leight; Fatemeh Kazemi, Despair and Die, 2021, book, curtains, edible print, wood, candles, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Smack Mellon. Photo by Etienne Frossard.
This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York City Council Member Lincoln Restler, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, many individuals and Smack Mellon’s Members.
Research for this exhibition was made possible by the generous support of The Gerda Henkel Foundation. Smack Mellon would like to thank Kelly and Adam Leight for their contribution.
Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and with generous support from The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc., and Exploring The Arts. In-kind donations are provided by Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
Smack Mellon would like to extend a special thanks to all of the individuals, foundations, and businesses who have contributed to the NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund.
