The Lotus Eaters 2019, photograph, archival pigment print, Ed.5+AP, 41x61 cm. Illustrative of society’s preoccupation with itself, these subjects denote the self-obsessive byproduct of our collective pursuit of identity, one step in a fluid trilogy of exhibition, dissemination, and approval.
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition cinema. For the length of the film, our lifelong battle against gravity is won; there are no limits... Anything the film introduces can be given life in our emotional center. We are free in ways that, otherwise, only dreams allow. Your artworks have often short titles, that often — as in Sisterhood and in Unconscious Voices — convey subtle messages and that allow you to clarify the message while maintaining the element of ambiguity: how do you go about naming your work? In particular, is it important for you to tell something that might walk the viewers through their visual experience? Christopher Fluder: Naming conventions have evolved in such a way as to require a name, an explanation, and a further reflection upon a single piece. This common requirement has marginalized those who choose not to provide a veritable thesis – in an arena once viewed, in the early days of salon photography, as impure at the mere mention of details outside of size and medium. That said, I believe there is a balance to be struck; if done with care, naming can afford the viewer a deeper glimpse into the work, without riding roughshod over their own very personal experience. Does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment? In particular, do
Christopher Fluder Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Sisterhood 2019, photograph, archival pigment print, Ed.5+AP, 38x51 cm.
Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Special Edition Rivington-on-Bowery 2020, photograph, archival pigment print, Ed.5+AP, 35x35 cm. Revealing what lies beneath our symbols and totems, the passage of time in paste art-strewn alleys serves to further define the urban condition: for better or worse, a witness to transition forced upon us.
Christopher Fluder Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW you think that artists can raise awareness to an evergrowing audience on topical issues that affect our everchanging society? Christopher Fluder: Can an artist, and have I, raised awareness to an “evergrowing audience” on myriad issues? Of course. Doing so in the face of societal upheaval and cultural adversity is a challenge we are all facing. Personally, I feel a responsibility to expose, highlight, and examine human evolution as much as the human condition. Authoring the unknown and lesser told chapters of history through my film work is the sincerest thing I can do: my part in looking after the future and taking that responsibility seriously. Over the years your artworks have been showcased in a number of occasions, including your current participation in Seasons, and you are going to participate in the group exhibition Silence, at PH21 Gallery, in Budapest, Hungary: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? By the way, as the move of Art from traditional gallery spaces, to street and especially to online platforms — as Instagram https://www.instagram.com/silva_vocat/ — increases, how would this in your opinion change the relationship with a globalised audience? Christopher Fluder: We’re well past online/street being viewed as disruptive. It has already moved from one to the other; the traditional gallery space as we knew it is moribund. The new normal, if you wish to employ the prefix “new,” is seemingly a stopover on a much more radical trajectory. We have really appreciated the multifaceted nature of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Christopher. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Christopher Fluder: I will be directing a feature my wife and I optioned and adapted from Laszlo Santha, a Tisch professor of mine. The script, Strangers, is a Cold War drama set in 1970s Budapest about coming of age in an era of suspicion, oppression, and revolution. After living through the pandemic’s more mercurial episodes, we’re readying to shoot in Budapest this year. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]
Hello Kinnari and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would like to invite our readers to visit https://www.kinnarisaraiya.com in order to get a wide idea about your multifaceted artistic production, and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a BFA with honours, that you received from Arts University Bournemouth: how did those formative years influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, are there any experiences that did particularly help you to develop your attitude to experiment? Kinnari Saraiya: Actually, before I started my course at Arts University Bournemouth, I did 2 years of Fine Art education in India and a year in the United States. I’ve been fortunate enough to receive such a wide range of educational approaches to Fine Art, while some focused on understanding the technicality of a material and the method, the others let conceptual research drive the process. I’ve always tried to find this balance in my works, of concept and of embodied practice that can be decoded and translated. Something I miss about university is having a group of intellectually diverse people at close enough proximity to hold informal critiques at any hour of the day. One of our semester challenges was to make work and exhibit anywhere but in a gallery space or a traditional exhibiting space. So, two of my friends and I found the exact opposite, Kinnari Saraiya, born in Bombay, India, addresses contemporary discourses of the imperial past from a post-colonial standpoint. Her grandfather has seen the final days of the British Raj to the early days of Indian independence and the post-colonial effects of it today. Her art practice, inspired by the stories engrained in her being, narrates the silences in history. She explores the absence of presence through sculpture, mixed media drawings and digital gif animations. She gives voice to the architectural landscape that is regarded as a silent witness of the British Raj and transforms it through contemporary techniques like laser-cutting and moulding. Further decolonising materiality in contemporary art, she hero’s chilli powder in her work to reflect domesticity and a sense of home through a spice that is vibrantly red and hot, symbolising violence. These, coming together as a cautionary tale, contemplates the duality of creation and destruction, past and present. While the voice is faded and neglected in their existence in the landscape, her responses allow space for reflection and speculation. She received her BFA with honours from Arts University Bournemouth in 2020, where she was awarded the Dean’s Prize for excellence in creativity for her recent project ‘Victoria Terminus’. The same project won the runners up prize at An Indian Festival 2020 and was shortlisted for the New Emergence Art: Unity Award in 2020. She has exhibited in solo shows both nationally and internationally, the British Pavilion’s basement at the Venice Biennale being one of them. Some of her notable group shows were held at London Metropolitan University in collaboration with the British Council (2020), Doug Adams Gallery in California (2020), Fort Mason Centre for Arts and Culture in San Francisco (2017), L.S Raheja School of Art in Bombay (2016) and many more. Her upcoming show, co-curated by her and Helen Starr, in collaboration with Chaos Magic Space and D-Unit is due to open in 2021. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Kinnari Saraiya
IT AIN'T SO PRETTY Approx. 210x125 cm Paper and acrylic paint 2018
an abandoned house, ruined to its bare bones with leaves growing through the roof and wet mud sinking in the floorboards. The interesting part is that it stands amongst some of the most prestigious houses in South England. So then the challenge was, how do you differentiate a work of art in a space that could be a work of art in itself? Art is incredibly subjective, so formal education taught me to keep experimenting and trying till I found the material I resonate with, till I find the process I’m most comfortable with and then take that, and experiment more with it. It never stops, we’re curious beings. How far can this particular material go before it starts becoming something else? You draw inspiration from the stories ingrained in your culture — your mixed media work It ain't so pretty is a brilliant example of this aspect of your practice — and it's important to mention that your grandfather has seen the final days of the British Raj to the early days of Indian independence and the post-colonial effects of it today: how do you consider the relationship between Past and Present playing within your practice, and how does your cultural substratum address the direction of your current artistic research? Kinnari Saraiya: The effects of colonialism have not an end, but a remnant. Could we ever decolonise our minds? I usually bring in the voices of those ‘witnesses’ that don’t have a voice of their own, traces, remains, archives, architectural structures of the Victorian Era, monuments etc because in their appearance, we’re not in the realm of true memory but of history. Concrete structures are a visual emblem of the Empire, even after its end. These were built before our existence, becoming a portal into the past and will stand after our demise, depicting the future. They merge the past and the future, presenting a continuum of thought and politics. Pulling them out of their natural habitat, the landscape, where we have become ignorant of their existence and placing them in a space where they can’t go unnoticed, has the potential to recontextualize, to work through and imagine beyond our histories. I talk about the modern-day whitewashing of cultural identity and heritage quite a lot in my work and this rises from the conveniently adjusted story that is history. For me, I grew up around colonial remnants in Bombay, not necessarily celebrated but existed. Some of these were worn down, very reflective of the time that has passed since independence. But as soon as I moved to London for further studies, I was suddenly surrounded by a different narrative of history. My history books in school told me that Winston Churchill was responsible for the genocide that was the Bengal Famine, but the British landscape reflected him to be the hero of the nation. Queen Victoria’s plinth remains intentionally empty in Bombay, but the Victoria Memorial in London remains a historic landmark. Realising that the colonial statues and what they represent can somehow become the sanitizers of truth has definitely questioned my memory surrounding the Empire. For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected Victoria Terminus, a stimulating project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our Kinnari Saraiya scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
attention of your work is the way it challenges the languages of monuments to urge the viewers to question historical issues: when walking our readers through your usual setup and process, would you tell us how you developed the initial idea of Victoria Terminus? Kinnari Saraiya: For the purpose of my education, I had been outside of India for 3 years before I decided to come back for a month’s holiday. This is important to mention because as Neri Oxman says ‘You have to go away to come back home. You never truly have a sense of home until you leave home.’ So when I did come back, I saw home from a whole new perspective. Things that I had gotten used to in my landscape became more evident than ever before. One such architectural marvel that had receded in the background of my everyday life was the Victoria Terminus building in Bombay, now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Named after Queen Victoria and built to commemorate her Golden Jubilee as the Empress of India, her statue was placed at the center of the building in a niche. After independence, either the statue went missing or the government took it down but there’s no trace of it. I noticed the empty niche and asked the security who told me about the mystery of the statue. This drove me to create work that replicates the plinth where she once stood and actively reject her presence on it. Arising from the idea of home, I painted the plinth in Chili Powder. It’s a spice that clouds the aroma of every home in India and it’s the spices that lured the British to ‘discover’ India and make it their home. Victoria Terminus and your artistic production in general derive from history, and mostly from history about colonization, to highlight questions passed over silence by mainstream scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Kinnari Saraiya scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Victoria Terminus Inspired by the niche in the Victoria Terminus, Bombay, India. Installation: 8 x 4 ft Wall space
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Victoria Terminus Inspired by the niche in the Victoria Terminus, Bombay, India. Installation: 8 x 4 ft Wall space
Kinnari Saraiya scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land narrative. Visual artists from different eras — from Eugène Delacroix, passing through Pablo Picasso, to more recently Fang Lijun — use to communicate more or less explicit messages in their artworks: do you think that artists can raise awareness to an ever growing audience on topical issues that affect our ever changing society? In particular, how do you consider the role of artists in our globalised and ever growing society? Kinnari Saraiya: Through art, we have before us an avenue for understanding and appreciating the extraordinary diversity of thought, feelings, culture, complexities and what ifs. Art lets us imagine a world where hierarchies were different, humanity was restored, and climate was unaltered without having to commit to these ideas of radical change. That’s where art is different from political campaigning. Art does not have to change the physicality of the world we live in; it changes the mentalities of the people we live with. It can feel like the world we live in is the only option, what is happening and how we are treated is the ultimate truth and that acceptance was key, but art and culture can expose us to a multiplicity of possible futures. To quote Olafur Eliasson, ‘art does not show people what to do yet engaging with a good work of art can connect you to your senses, body, and mind. It can make the world felt.’ So, as artists, I believe we have the responsibility of presenting an alternative to the truth of the society that we can’t come to terms with. For me, that’s the convenient amnesia towards the British Empire masked under commemorative statues. We have really appreciated the way Victoria Terminus challenges the viewers' perceptual parameters, and more in general, the way you introduce the idea of visuality as the ultimate truth, to shed a whole new light to
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition architectural landscape and the stories hidden in it. We dare say that you practice seems to make the viewers question the reality of the situation, providing the spectatorship with freedom to realize their own perception: as an artist particularly interested in recontextualizing public monuments, how important is it for you to trigger the viewers' imagination in order to address them to elaborate personal interpretations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? Kinnari Saraiya: My work is inspired by the very personal stories that are ingrained in my being, through the stories passed down generations, my experiences growing up in Bombay and living in London and primarily speaking a language that I can’t call my own, not by choice but by the system dictated by the powerful. Since most of my work so far has been exposed to British or European audiences, making it universal just then means making it palatable for the white and privileged, which has essentially made up the visuality that I’m challenging through my work. In that sense, universal is far from universal. I believe that, the more intricate and deeply felt a work of art is, the more relevant it can become; the more general and universal it tries to be, the more it loses its power to move us. True universality may be a myth, and an oppressive one at that, but if universality can be achieved through the personal, it can cause an impact like none other. I can only hope that my work achieves that balance. You are a versatile artist and drawing inspiration from the Past, you create stimulating artworks through contemporary techniques like laser-cutting and moulding, as in the interesting installation Coexist: how do
Kinnari Saraiya scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land COEXIST 90x160x1 cm MDF and coloured cellophane 2018
COEXIST 90x160x1 cm MDF and coloured cellophane 2018
you consider the role of technology in your artistic practice? In particular, do you think that your use of cutting edge techniques highlights the fact that your artworks establish a bridge, such a channel of communication between past and present, between Tradition and Contemporariness? Kinnari Saraiya: The Indian Fine Art education, when I was studying there, focused mainly on perfecting traditional techniques, the kind that the masters employed. So I’ve always had this formal training in sculpting with clay and painting with oils but for me, it’s interesting to twist these and forge these through new technology, recontextualising them and pulling their context from the past Kinnari Saraiya scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land COEXIST 90x160x1 cm MDF and coloured cellophane 2018
Chess Drawing Series 1/14 11 x 15 inch / 28 x 38 cm Chilli Powder and Charcoal
into the present to question the future. If we can dive into the past, then the present is only the surface of the ocean - the opposite is true in the technicality of my work, the work presents itself to be mined from the past but hides the contemporariness underneath. Perhaps, in some ways, my work becomes a more accurate version of the past, corrected by our later experiences. As an artist particularly interested in giving voice to the architectural landscape, how do your surroundings and your everyday life's experience fuel your creative process? scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Chess Drawing Series 1/14 11 x 15 inch / 28 x 38 cm Chilli Powder and Charcoal
Kinnari Saraiya: I’d like to answer this on the basis of something that Albert Camus said - “No artist tolerates reality, says Nietzsche. Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world. But it rejects the world on account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is.” The colonial relationship between India and England is something one cannot escape, it lives in the landscape, culture and attitude. The remnants of the colonial era invoke a sense of loss in my mind, loss of life, loss of validation and loss of identity. And I want to create something from that place of loss, not scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Kinnari Saraiya Land LOOK DOWN ON ME AND REFLECT In response to Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum Site-Specific Sculpture 3 steps of 100cms x 30cms x 15cms each White laser cut acrylic, varnished wood and mirrors
LOOK DOWN ON ME AND REFLECT In response to Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum Site-Specific Sculpture 3 steps of 100cms x 30cms x 15cms each White laser cut acrylic, varnished wood and mirrors
to erase or replace the original, but to build something from the ruins that can stand as a testament. Adding to the statement that ruins still live on and that the end of colonialism was not the end of the problem. Symbols play an important role in your practice, and the steps in Look Down on Me and Reflect symbolise elevation and hierarchy: how do you consider the role of metaphors playing in your artistic practice? And how important is it for you to create artworks rich in allegorical qualities? Kinnari Saraiya: All the world's truth is hidden in symbols and cryptic messages and we spend our lives unfolding those truths in our own ways, don’t we? Divided by language, we’re united by symbols and metaphors. Everyone, from any part of the world would understand ruins of the landscape in the same way. There is a consciousness of the history, of its destruction in the landscape, of a past and a kind of potential within the ruins, not through the words that describe it but through the image that captures it. I’m keen on capturing the universal through the personal. For me, it starts internally, it starts from the stories in my mind that are somehow projected into the real world in the form of architectural remnants, traces of what once was which then becomes a source of my works. Through the work Look Down on Me and Reflect, I’m revealing hierarchy through a stairway of mirrors but I conveniently place it on the ground, compelling the viewer to look down and reflect on the same hierarchy that was dictated during colonisation. You are an established artist: '‘Victoria Terminus’' won the runners up prize at An Indian Festival 2020 and was shortlisted for the New Emergence Art, and over the years your have exhibited in solo shows both, nationally and scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Kinnari Saraiya scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Queen Victoria, Fragile Series 2020 Charcoal on textured paper 35.5 x 25 cm
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Victoria Terminus Inspired by the niche in the Victoria Terminus, Bombay, India. Installation: 8 x 4 ft Wall space
internationally, including your participation to the British Pavilion’s basement at the prestigious Venice Biennale: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? By the way, as the move of Art from traditional gallery spaces, to street and especially to online platforms — as Instagram — increases, how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalised audience? Kinnari Saraiya: I like work that catches me off guard, the kind that can hit my reality with a brick when I wasn’t prepared for it. In a way, Instagram shatters the elitism surrounding traditional art spaces, because it doesn’t matter who you know and where you live, the audience is global. But, what I’m cautious about when making work for the screen is the flattening of the experience and the divide it creates between the digital haves and have nots which is majorly guided - not by choice, but by economic inequality. Personally, there’s something about displaying my work in a physical black cube that I enjoy, the void, a space where everything can become a deadend except the artwork that’s in there. I’m somehow sucking the audience in like it's a black hole, there’s no escape, they’re forced to face reality. Although my works are not intended for social media, they do live on my profile: @kinnarisaraiya / https://www.instagram.com/kinnarisaraiya/ We have really appreciated the multifaceted nature of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Kinnari. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Kinnari Saraiya: Thank you so much for having me, your questions compelled me to dive deeper into my own practice and share the most intimate details. Thank you to all the readers as well for keeping up with my practice thus far, I hope that you can stay with me while I develop further and explore more. Since the pandemic hit, I was selected as one of the 16 Core Resident Artists at Spur World, which was supported by many organisations as a response to lack of opportunities for the 2020 graduating cohort. We’ve been in workshops and mentorship sessions to develop a piece of work that’s due to be in exhibition from the 1st of April 2021. My world is called ‘End Game’, A chess board set within London’s Parliament Square - where Winston Churchill’s statue stands opposite Mahatma Gandhi’s statue - unlocks the endless ruin of minds and thoughts that decided the fate of the empire. The game becomes a dramatic spectacle of the British Empire unfolding through non-violence on the chess board. After which I’ve been in 2 virtual residencies hosted by organisations in the United States and Austria. I’m supposed to go to Russia for a residency when the pandemic settles and it’s safe to do so. So, definitely some new exciting works in process. You can visit my website - www.kinnarisaraiya.com & follow me on my instagram - https://www.instagram.com/kinnarisaraiya/ scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Kinnari Saraiya Land An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]
Hello and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production and we would like to invite our readers to visit in order to get a wide idea about your mulifaceted artistic production. It's important to remark that Memoticon is the result of a proficient collaboration between creative Emotion and reason have long been considered opposites, mostly to subordinate the alleged feminine to the alleged masculine. Unless, that is, a male artist's works express feelings, urges, and passion, which has been traditionally regarded as a sign of g reatness. Even recent research shows gender bias in art evaluation: In a recent experiment conducted by Adams at al. (2018), participants could not tell the gender of the artist by merely looking at paintings beyond statistical chance. However, participants who often visit art galleries, along with affluent individuals and male respondents, appreciated paintings less when they guessed that the painting was made by a female artist. Art auction figures also show gender imbalance: A comprehensive study done by the same authors found a 47.6% gender discount in auction prices for paintings based on 1.5 million auction transactions in 45 countries. As Adams and her colleagues succintly observe, “women’s art appears to sell for less because it is made by women.” With our series entitled Axioms of Passion, we subvert common codes of art evaluation by not telling perceivers which of us created which piece. In other worlds, we do not reveal the truth about which pieces, if any, have a proper penis connection. For the 2021 edition of “LandEscape Now!”, we took our project further: We made it more interactive by randomly labeling pieces — based on coin flipping — with “Made by a male artist” and “Made by a female artist”, in each case adding the question, “How much do you think this piece is worth?” Thus, our tree series reflects on, and makes visible, the cultural landscape we are surrounded with whilst creating and appreciating art even if we are often not aware of it. Albeit “cultural landscape” might seem to be used in a metaphoric sense here, its effects are quite concrete. Furthermore, our series does not merely symbolize an already existing cultural landscape: Through initiating a dialogue with viewers — who themselves are also part of that landscape —, we aim to provoke a conscious reflection on deeply ingrained biases against women. We hope, therefore, that the project will contribute to an escape from a centuries-old landscape to give way to less biased and more democratic surroundings. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Memoticon
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition We are a female-faced conceptual artist unit with somewhat unusual backgrounds involving, among others, philosophy and translation. Currently, we are outsider artists, striving to integrate into the art world whilst retaining some of our brut point of view and questioning certain implicit rules of the game. For instance, at the moment, we don’t feel like talking about ourselves in the third person to pretend that someone else wrote something objective about us. Instead of being afraid to honestly point out our strengths, we dare claim that part of our artistic values stems from our unabashed subjectivity. Should you be interested in our story, feel free to read about us at https://memoticon.art/who.
minds from different fields: could you tell us something about this proficient synergy? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between artists from different backgrounds? Memoticon: Hello and thank you for the opportunity to present ourselves. When collaborating on a piece, we discuss the steps to be taken in advance or on the fly depending on the project, and we proceed accordingly. In general, one of us is better at coming up with execution-related ideas and at the execution itself of visual pieces that require patience with technicalities, while doing research along with devising verbal and visual ideas suits the other member of our unit better. Contrary to Sol LeWitt, we do not believe that “the execution is a perfunctory affair” compared to the alleged supremacy of ideas. We do not believe in the distinctions we have just used for simplicity, either. For instance, written texts, which we consider integral parts of our artistic practice, are also visual and demand patience with technicalities. We also gravely oversimplified and deliberately distorted the nature of our collaboration above so that we can stay true to our intention of obscuring our exact roles in our artistic production. We admit, though, that whilst we tend to get along quite well, one of us is not particularly fond of the consequences of using glitter, which shows up everywhere no matter how hard we try to clean up the place. This is one of the reasons why we work hard, still continuing our Pop Art period, so that we can have a home with a separate studio space. To eliminate the glitter problem. For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected Axioms of Passion, a stimulating series that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that has at once captured our attention for its ability to force the viewers' perception, urging them to continuously switch between the instinctive tendency to decypher the reminders to figurative elements, and the aesthetic appreciation of the unique abstract feeling: when walking our readers through your usual setup and process, would you tell us how do you usually develop the initial ideas for your artworks? In particular, do you create your works gesturally, instinctively? Or do you methodically transpose geometric schemes? Memoticon: For this series, we departed from an actual tree nearby and transformed its shape in diverse ways. On the one hand, it was our intention to enable free expression of emotions, urges and moods in accordance with the series title, so we left plenty of room for spontaneity. On the other hand, since we are interested in questioning the validity of certain widespread distinctions, we used geometric schemes partially methodically, in that it was also part of our core ideas to create a series in which pieces either “in themselves” or as part of the series blur the lines between figurative and abstract art. One painting was not even part of the series originally. When a professor saw some our works belonging to the series along with that piece, he started to talk about the tree in that painting with conviction. We liked the apparent fact that a tree could be perceived in a painting independently of our original intentions, and since the phenomenon fit into Memoticon scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
our concepts for Axioms of Passion, we included the piece in the series under the title Tree? / Somewhat Puzzling (An Unshakable Orientation Towards the Question Mark in Springtime). The main aim of your Axioms of Passion series is to highlight the theme of gender imbalance that still affect our globalised still patriarchal society — even and especially as regards the value of the work of art itself. To provoke the viewers, each work has been randomly labeled with “Made by a male artist” and “Made by a female artist”, with the question, “How much do you think this piece is worth?”. What kind of reactions do you aim to provoke in the viewers? Memoticon: We aim to provoke in the viewers a reflection on their own views and potential biases concerning the relationship between the sex or gender of artists and the value of their artistic production, and, possibly, a reflection on whether they actually wish to own those views in the future. Since Artemisia Gentileschi's times to our apparently likely open-minded art scene, women have struggled to find their voices, and are still discouraged from distancing themselves from traditional artistic paths: it will be a long process but over the last century we have already seen lots of original awareness among women artists, and especially in the last decades there are signs that something is — hopefully irreversibly — changing: what should be in your opinion the role of artists in order to raise awareness about such themes that can no longer be postponed? Memoticon: Artists might be able to raise some awareness, but systemic changes require more scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Memoticon scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Denim Windthrow Made by a female artist .How much do you think this piece is worth?
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Draft of Longing Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth?
Memoticon scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land than artist activism. For example, as Maria Hanson pointed out, the Guerrilla Girls’ — whose works we admire, as well — did manage to raise awareness of gender disparity in museum and gallery culture; yet nothing much changed between the 80s, when the group presented their first posters, and the first decade of the 21st century. Apparently, the tides are slowly changing; however, women artists are still vastly underrepresented in museums and the global auction market, as shown by Beatriz Lozano’s 2019 infographics on Artnet. We agree with Maura Reilly that beyond artists, support is also needed from curators, teachers, collectors, and the press to effect substantial changes. We are grateful that LandEscape contributes to changing the landscape. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once highlighted If Dalí's Clock Strikes Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth? Thy Will with Mine Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth?
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition the connection between creativity and the part of the world artists are in: do you think that your artistic research responds to a particular cultural moment? In particular, do you think that artists can raise awareness to an evergrowing audience on generic topical issues in our globalised age? Memoticon: The issues that we have raised so far are topical in that gender biases and inequalities in art and culture still exist today. Presenting Axioms of Passion, we also relied on quite recent research with regard to gender and evaluation of works of art, including art auction gender imbalance. In our ongoing series Gems of Wisdom: Comments on Great Minds, we explore possible modes of resistance concerning deeply ingrained cultural biases against women whose remnants still linger today. Magma in Our Veins Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth? A Queenite's Anticipation Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth?
Memoticon scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Tree? Somewhat Puzzling Made by a female artist .How much do you think this piece is worth?
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Knocking Spring Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth?
Hopefully, now we have a better chance at being heard than, for instance, feminists had even a few decades ago, both owing to a more receptive cultural climate and a globalised audience. As you have remarked in your artist's statement, your tree series reflects on, and makes visible, the cultural landscape we are surrounded. By challenging the viewers' perceptual parameters, your artworks invite your audience to discern and interpret. In this sense, we daresay that your artistic practice seems to aim to look inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface, providing the spectatorship with freedom to realize their own perception: how important is for you to trigger the viewers' imagination in order to address them to elaborate personal interpretations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? Memoticon: With Axioms of Passion, it is our aim to orientate the viewers’ interpretation and evaluation of artworks towards Memoticon scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Zonelet Twist Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth? Dance Eversion Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth?
cooperating in the creation of a less biased cultural landscape. Nonetheless, what one wishes for is not necessarily what one gets, and viewers are free to use their imagination, interpretation, and perception. Maybe strokes of true art were ensured by dexterous male hands, a passion for metaphysics, allusions to the Philosopher’s Tree, alchemical unification of knowledge and passion, tree of life, archetypal depth, postsecular, hyper-contextual, such an achievement. Or perhaps the same strokes were botched by a female hysterically pouring out her penis envy on the canvas, it’s plausible, but what if there’s a further twist in the story, what if the female-looking guy identifies as a male, maybe she he even acquired a penis, that would turn everything upside down, or perhaps not, perhaps we should positively discriminate her or him to save face, whether or not she or he has male genitals; after all, who knows these days, who knows, really? scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Soaring Anger Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth? As an Aside Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth?
I Seem to Be Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth?
With their effective combination of thoughtful nuances and sometimes ambiguous patterns and geometries — as in the interesting A Queenite's Anticipation and Denim Windthrow— your works feature tension and dynamics: how did you come about settling on your color palette? And how does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in your artworks? Memoticon: For the pieces of this series, we decided on the color palette based on our moods, as it fit the overall concept. Sometimes we reworked a painting after a while. For example, for the piece that eventually became Denim Windthrow, we originally used permanent yellow deep and violet with dark ultramarine and cadmium red, and we liked it that way. After almost a year, however, we felt an urge to change the painting, and that’s when we applied white paint. The hybrid visual quality that marks out your artworks allows you to capture fleeting moments providing the viewers with such an emotional impact: how do you consider the role of memory playing within your artistic practice? In particular, how does your travels and your everyday life's experience fuel your creative process? Memoticon: Yes, one of the reasons behind Axioms of Passion is that we wanted freedom to experiment with different styles and still have a series that can be regarded as coherent based on overall concepts and features, including the play with the idea and shape of trees. Hybridity can also be considered a unifying trait in that experimenting with visual quality scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Memoticon scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Cherish Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth?
characterizes the series. As for the role of memory in our artistic activities, we certainly use memory while creating; ergo, our creations are profound. For instance, from the depths of our memory, we sometimes recall our travels to scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Then a Sigh Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth?
the toilet or to our laptops, or how we tried to turn off the tap in the kitchen that started dripping, or whether we left the light on in the bathroom, thereby wasting precious energy and jeopardizing economic efficiency. In fact, we have already developed the idea of a small series entitled Memory, where we intend to maintain that the word in the title makes our pieces worth millions. Our point is that “memory” seems to be a trendy meme in the art world, apparently used to indicate profundity or some other mysterious artistic quality. Probably due to our background as outsiders, the practice of throwing in a generic term for a fairly common faculty (or faculties) as a proof of high artistic value amuses us at best and seems to us a bad joke at worst (admittedly, with the exception of our planned series). For instance, some time ago, we read in an artist statement on the website of a prominent gallery that although the artist’s works seemed simple and quickly made, they came from the depths of his memory. Quite clearly, the reference to memory was offered as a purported justification for high prices. Here, our own memory reminds us of “pseudo-profound bullshit,” a term coined by Pennycook at al. for assertions “constructed to impress upon the reader some sense of profundity”, truthiness or meaningfulness, whereas they are so vague and ambigous that they are actually vacuous. For example, in case the underlying assumption is that memory usage guarantees high artistic value, then, arguably, all memoryrequiring actions, products, perceptions, data etc. of organisms and computers are of high artistic quality. One can certainly hold such a view; but then, we would expect at least some argument as to why memory automatically transforms everything it touches into a valuable artwork, and perhaps less bullshitting scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Memoticon Land
Reflections on Kant
Embroidered Symphony Made by a female artist How much do you think this piece is worth?
about exceptionally high prices. Another interesting body of works that has particularly impressed us and that we would like to introduce to our readers is entitled COMMENTS ON IMMANUEL KANT #1 and we have really appreciated the way it questions the blurry boundaries between female and male identities. In particular, do you think that gender bias affect mostly male viewers or do you think that it's a general issue? Memoticon: It seems to be a more general and complex issue. As Maura Reilly observes, bias in favor of males on the part of female arts professionals, including women curators, also forms part of the problem. On the other hand, she also cites a 2014 study conducted by the Association of Art Museum Directors, as per which more men occupy upper-level positions in museums than women, and female directors earn far less than the average male director. One of the experiments conducted by Adams at al. found that male participants, affluent viewers and individuals who often visit art galleries appreciated paintings less when they guessed that the painter was female. In another experiment where the researchers randomly associated female and male names with computer-generated paintings, affluent participants — especially those who visit art galleries or exhibitions — had a lower appreciation for paintings when they believed the artist to be female. How do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? By the way, as the move of Art from traditional gallery spaces, to street and especially to online platforms — as Instagram — increases, how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalised audience? Memoticon: We have had mixed experiences with online platforms so far. People from around the globe express their appreciation for our works, which we are grateful for. We can also admire the works of others that we probably wouldn’t be able to see otherwise. On the other hand, a globalised audience also means that complete strangers want things from you that you are not necessarily eager to provide. For example, when we created an artist profile on Facebook, we almost immediately received penis photos, gifs with pornographic content, blatantly fake offers to accept some stranger’s heritage who finds us trustworthy, and tons of messages basically about nothing. It amazes us how so many people seem to have plenty of time for trivial small talk. We don’t, and since we deemed maintaining several social media sites at once too time-consuming, we have temporarily shut down all except our Instagram site at https://www.instagram.com/memoticon. We have really appreciated the multifaceted nature of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Memoticon. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Memoticon: We are currently working on our series Gems of Wisdom and also plan to realize the Memory series we mentioned earlier. Thank you very much for the interview; it was our pleasure. Memoticon scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]
Hello Jaleh and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a BA in Painting: how did those formative years influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum due to your Persian roots address your current artistic research? Jaleh Farshi: Hello, thank you for having me. I began exploring the world of painting in my teenage years, and then I entered the academic world to learn painting in a systematic way. I've always been fascinated by light and shadow and how they affect the perception of reality. For my thesis, I chose Jean-Baptiste Chardin (18th century French painter). His work on light and shadow has had a significant impact on my work. I learned to pay attention to details, light reflections, and shadows to see things from a new perspective. I might say that the most important development I made during those years was understanding what it meant to "see things differently." After finishing university, I continued to look for answers that I couldn't find in academia. I became more curious about my environment I am a painter whose paintings depict Iran's landscapes. The landscape is not just geography or place, it is also memory and spirit. The recollection of the past that we've all experienced at some stage in our lives. I take what I see in the landscape and imagine how it relates to my personal experience. I am not governed by what is true. I am creating an artwork that, to a large degree, is recognizable to all. The one that both exists in reality and imagination. My paintings represent subjects that are familiar from reality, but also part of the artistic imagination. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Jaleh Farshi