Gramercy, New York
Farkhondeh Shahroudi
Of Weeping Trees
Goethe-InstitutThe Goethe-Institut New York is pleased to present the first US solo-exhibition of artist Farkhondeh Shahroudi. This exhibition showcases new and older works ranging in media including drawing, video, sculpture, textiles, artist books, and more across nearly 30 years of Shahroudi's practice. In her work, Shahroudi inhabits the space between, around, and beyond language. Taking up the tradition of automatic writing, Shahroudi invites the space of sub- and unconsciousness to bubble up in a flow of association and poetic expression. Understanding all her work as three-dimensionally materialized poems, Shahroudi abstains from explicitly recounting the history of her migration from Iran to Germany in 1990, where she has lived ever since. Rather, memory, in her work, operates as a more subtle thread weaving between the political and a childlike coyness. Playfully integrating language constructions containing simultaneous elements of absurdist humor and moments of grief, Shahroudi invites the viewer into her world, enabling us to listen to the echoes of a multiple present. Of Weeping Trees evokes and reframes the colonial material rubber—from which bicycle tubes, a material ubiquitous in Shahroudi’s practice, are made—and calls forth reoccurring themes present in the artist’s oeuvre such as identity, language, family, and psychology. Using mixed media such as rubber, artificial hair, hand-knotted Persian carpet, artist books, biomaterial from trees, and more, Shahroudi highlights materials and traditions referencing her Persian background, while detourning them to create new associations. Forced to leave her country after her participation in the Iranian Revolution as a young woman, Shahroudi, in her artistic work, returns time and time again to imagery such as roots, stems, branches, flowers, and leaves that encapsulate the bittersweetness of growth, gain, and loss in the dispossession of family, identity, and language, while acquiring new community and strategies of expression through the German language as a “second mother-tongue.” Of Weeping Trees features never or rarely exhibited video and photographic work from the 2000s-2010s in conversation with newly created sculpture and expansions of ongoing series to demonstrate how homeland and community are constructed, and how Shahroudi understands herself within, but beyond, the context of exile and nationality. Curated by Zachary B. Feldman Curatorial assistance by Nelya Rosa Ahmia & Olivia Al-Slaiman This exhibition is kindly supported by the Körber Stiftung, ISCP, and Norse Airlines.