The Shape of Things (Alinah Azadeh)

July Visit to Bristol Museum part 1

So, the visit to the Museum this time round was a very different experience – ‘Banksy vs Bristol Museum’ is on at the moment (witty, irreverent, playful, I like it..) and it is a phenomenon. There were people outside queuing for up to 4 hours, and a total cross section of society. I was envious… it was like seeing people queue up to go clubbing..very refreshing!

So, to even get into the place I had to enter through a Secret Door, which of course I enjoyed immensely, through passages and intercoms, via the reception which is currently Banksy-ed up as a vandalised Ice Cream Van…and into the office of Kate Newnham who , together with the Textiles Conservationist Jane Taylor – Bouvier, showed me some truly beautiful Indian and Iranian textiles work, to inspire.

I showed them my wrapped objects and Jane talked about how we will have to freeze all the objects for a week as soon as they enter the museum (this applies to all acquired items) and I find this weirdly exciting.

Kate gave me a great selection of Japanese gifts she had been given , wrapped using Furoshikis, (square materials used for wrapping gifts, often very beautiful in themselves) to use in my workshop the next day..

I had a good chat with my brother –in-law Mark about my idea of hanging the objects in the shape of a Persian carpet. I had started to abandon this idea in favour of a floor piece as it seemed complex and unmanageable, but we looked at examples of hanging installation and I realise that the work needs to FLY and be IMMERSIVE in some sense. We discussed ideas with Julia and Simon the 3D designer and they are looking into the logistics of hanging 999 objects so will know soon if I can go with this idea and start making models etc.

This project is gathering momentum.

We had a Shape.. meeting with everyone in London the other week to discuss PR/audience development. It was at Oxford House in Betnnal green, just by Weavers Field , appropriately enough…Just being with everyone, talking ourselves into the future of our respective projects acted like a catalyst for me, it made it very real and I have begun to really enjoy the process of wrapping and also thinking about the space and the audience who will be experiencing the work. I wrapped 5 of my mothers objects – a set of keys, her wallet, her cheque book, her camera and a Persian cookery book that she and then I used so much that the pages went transparent with cooking oil.

I used green fabric, my new favourite colour, a socio-political act given what is currently unfolding in Iran, her country, right now. I then bound them in fuschia pink yarn and the finality of this act was somehow thrilling and devastating at the same time..there is now a boundary of cloth between myself and what these objects came to mean – they were key items of hers that I felt I could not throw way but I didn’t want the responsibility of keeping anymore. So now they are part of a collective legacy in cloth and I think she would have enjoyed their poetic relocation into an artwork of mine!

I then added two objects of my own – my wedding shoes,.They had broken straps but carried such strong memories of the slowest, most delicious walk down the grassy aisle towards the river where we said our vows. Since I wore red and it was a blue moon I bound them in strips of my red silk dressing gown and blue kilim wool.

I remember telling myself to go slowly and take in everyone’s face as I passed, to take snapshots so that in the moments before I die, I can replay them and experience a sense of communal joy and love that that day resonated with (is this weird??). This week it will be five years since we married, my daughter was born and my mum passed away – in that order.

THE ARDABIL CARPET – RETURNING HOME

I was at the V+A yesterday, and visited the Islamic Middle East section now housed in the Jameel Gallery. I was looking for inspiration for the layout The Gifts within the gallery and a link with Rosa’s work, which, as I understand it, will be predominantly wall work. I was looking for a personal and conceptual link, a bridge.

I spent some time sketching large ottoman rug on the wall and remembered an idea I had many years ago when I first starting thinking about wrapping objects and what the ultimate gift between nations was in ancient cultures –The Magic Carpet. The memory came of my and my brothers feet running around the outer border of one of our red, cream and violet Persian silk rugs (I can see it from my desk here, it seems so small now and so big then). We used to pretend we were flying across the globe on all kinds of adventures, for hours on end. Later on in my teens I dreamed of flying on a needle through glass palaces…

Anyhow, back to the Jameel Gallery. I saw a group of women in Islamic dress who were being toured around the gallery by a guide who was talking of ‘4914 knots in every 10cms…one of the worlds oldest, finest and largest carpets in the world..’ . they drew aside and then a light change occurred and I saw it – an enormous rug lying in the centre of the space, within glass walls and under a mirrored canopy. I sat on one of the sofas at one end and gazed down the length of it, taking in its delicate and yet monumental beauty – quite a moment.

The idea of using this as a starting point for a floor design in Bristol, where objects would be hung or placed to create the impression of a huge carpet design came back into focus. The floral borders and a concept and structure inspired by nature took me to Rosa’s work and how this could be a connection ?

I then went to the far end of the case to get some more information on the origin of the carpet, though something in me felt it even as I approached the text : ‘The Ardabil Carpet’. Ardabil was the town closest to my mother’s village, Namin, in North-West Iran where she was born. It is said to have very possibly been made for the Sufi shrine turned Mosque in Ardabil, during the Safavid Period. Visiting that place was one of the most resonant moments of my first trip to Iran in 1992. I feel a part of me has come home in this project and anticipating where it will lead me next, like a love affair woven in silk.

I have been quite silent on my blogs over the last few weeks as all my free time has been spent glued to twitter, Youtube and various news websites watching and feeling the events in Iran unfold, with a mixture of disbelief, amazement, horror and utter excitement to see a shift after so many years of repression. This was the time my mother was working towards and waiting for and I feel her spirit very closely observing in delight as shifts take place within the mindset and among the crowds on the streets of Iranian cities that will not be lost despite the constant brutal attempts to silence the growing calls for freedom and self-expression.

As someone who is connected to Iran mainly through my mother and all she tried to transmit to me about the political landscape there, often with such great passion and rage (at the mullahs) that she almost burst out of her body, I look now at how I can connect to this through this project and honour her at the same time.

Gifts 2 –6, then, are personal objects of my mothers and I am wrapping them in green, to connect with the Sea of Green in Iran, initially the Islamic colour denoting allegiance to the opposition candidate Mousavi, now broadening out into the colour of hope, freedom and resistance to tyranny.

I was at the press launch of the Shape of things the other week, it was a small but satisfying affair as there was a tube strike that day and getting to Flow Gallery was in itself an act of great achievement. It was the first time I had been to flow (who are a partner in The Shape of Things programme, with an exhibition planned for next autumn of all 8 artists work).

I was asked to speak briefly along with Rosa, Tasmin and Chien about what being part of this programme means to me and my practice. In having to focus on this I realised how much of the content and form of my work over the last ten years has been directly influenced and created by my Iranian heritage : the use of textile media, the desire and need to communicate and engage with large numbers of people, the aesthetics of the work itself and the core use of poetry to both inspire and interpret the work. It seems very fitting that I am working on a piece called ‘The Gifts’, that in itself will be a kind of acknowledgement of my heritage through my mother.

Here is one of the most resonant and powerful forms of expression to come out of Iran in recent weeks in response to the events that have been going on:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lundberg/poetry-of-the-revolution_b_221590.html

A culture that uses poetry in this way to channel its creative self even in the darkest of times is a culture that will only grow stronger through this most bloody and heart-achingly challenging time..

The Gift

So the interactive ‘operator’ in this new work is The Gift. Here are some thoughts I have found on The Gift while reading Lewis Hyde’ The Gift: Creativity and The Artist in the Modern World’.

‘The Gift is to the Giver, and comes back most to him – it cannot fail’ (Walt Whitman)

‘The Gift that is not used is lost, while one that is passed along remains abundant’

‘Gifts are a class of property whose value lies only in their use and which literally cease to exist as gifts if they are not constantly consumed’

‘A circulation of gifts nourishes those parts of our spirit that are not entirely personal , parts that derive from nature, the group, the race or the Gods’

‘…The Gifts we give at times of transformation are meant to make visible the giving up we do invisibly. And of course we hope that there will be an exchange , that something will come towards us if we abandon our old lives..The tokens we receive at times of change are meant to make visible life’s reciprocation. They are not mere compensation for what is lost. But the promise of what lies ahead . they guide us towards new life, assuring our passage away from what is dying’

And most pertinently for me at this stage in the project:

‘..gift exchange is a companion to transformation, a sort of guardian or marker or catalyst….a gift may be the actual agent of change, the bearer of new life’

I have been working a lot with life rituals and making pieces that mark them in some way – birth, bereavement, cultural transitions within life etc

What happens when I ask people I don’t know to give me things they don’t want and then think about and express what they do now want from the space the unwanted thing has left?

A process of transformation, which is a concept underlying all my work, is what I am seeking to offer up. Firstly in the making of the work, through transforming unwanted things into a group of artefacts with new meaning and context. Also, in the articulation by the Giver of what the gifted item represents in terms of leaving something behind and what new, emotional object can be presenced in their lives for future unwrapping?