Katayoun Amjadi • Artaxis.org

Two of the works in this series, Wall, and Gate seek to locate the body in a place of yearning anticipation, of wanting to reach for the other side, beyond the barrier and border. In the first of these, Wall, the room for the installation is divided into two halves. The viewer can enter into one side or the other, but once there cannot cross to the opposite side. The wall in this instance is composed of thirteen transparent panels with each one grounded in concrete building blocks, as if the foundation of home. The panels are scaled to the size of a door, and carry an array of white porcelain doorknobs suggesting an array of choice, yet none can turn, nor open passage to the other side. On one side of the installation a single white porcelain key is suspended from a golden thread, swaying and turning gently, yet just out of reach.

While the installation Wall proposes barrier and promise denied, the installation Gate proposes passage and a dream held in suspension. This is the passage between immanence and transcendence, the liminal threshold. It is the space between separation and acceptance. It is a world of anticipation, ambiguity and exile. This is the breach between what you leave behind and what you yearn for: home, mobility, and freedom. To awake here is to find you’re suspended in the rift of homelessness, and longing to arrive.

This work is part of the Domestic Affairs series that investigates the idea of home in body, structure and land, and explores the culturally embedded promise of security and hope engendered in the archetypal house. It explores a conceptual topography of “place”; it is a kind of domestic archeology. We tend to map the contours of security and safety into the image of home as a protective refuge, a shelter from the storm, as if they were the essential constituent parts of making a home. If so then what becomes of the homeless, the unmooring of the subjects of exchangeable labor, the children born into diaspora, or on the other side of the wall or border, those that live in the cracks, fissures and shadows of the world; what happens to those consigned to forage through the wasteland of broken promises? What happens when we live in fear or hatred of otherness, homelessness, of alterity?

The Garden strictly seen, is a collection of objects, gathered from disparate times and places, yet ready to hand and familiar, and common in the world of their origin. Some carry with them their use and histories, and their muted voices of daily ritual cleansing, largely hidden from view, as required by the proscriptions of cultural etiquette, while at the same time indicating a more profound ethnic and cultural cleansing, as if an existential component of “being soiled”. In this garden the commonplace objects are the crop of mass production, born into the world of the consumer, and as such they represent the strange fruit of global petrochemical production and the market of consumable goods. Their presence in the garden suggests their implication in the death of the garden, yet their material transformation in this work also implies the possibility of re-framing the premise of capital acquisition, to one of the ecology of mindful stewardship and the labor of careful making; their material transformation from plastic to ceramic signals a form of resistance to the project of modernity. Gathering them here calls them out from quiet stillness into a focusing of their voices, from silence or inchoate chatter and babble, through rudimentary syllables of hope or despair to a speaking of ideas and potential. To collect them from remote geographies and cultural histories, to transport them from a different time and place, and locate them in The Garden in this way is to begin to articulate what I find, feel and see in the world. The Garden is the myth turned on its head, and proposes an alternate view: alluring, tempting, beautiful, fruitful, yet very nearly dead, with its “heart… swollen under the sun”. It proposes that the project of humanity is an idea not a promise: mutable, fragile, and at this moment, hanging by a thread.

$Silent Scream is a durational and immersive ceramics and video installation. The impending shatter of clay bodies frozen in ice, presents a sense of contingency and precariousness in viewers, the anticipation of fracture. As the ice melts the body of the bottle slowly reveals itself, and as if gazing into the disappearing haze of a clouded mirror you begin to see yourself: an empty vessel, headless, perhaps heedless, with gaping mouth frozen into a silent scream. Here the systemic failures, fragilities and unpredictability of living in this historical moment is felt bone-deep before the truth of it is fully, mindfully apprehended.$

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Statement

My work as an artist is always at once personal, my “small piece of truth” and yet frequently seeks a kinship within otherness and difference. One of the questions that I carry through my work is the sufficiency of the story I tell, and why and how my identity is articulated in the work. My work thus carries my history as an Iranian-American, yet is never just that, nor always that. Identity explored in my work is neither fixed nor an erasure, but always an ongoing synthetic process of investigation and becoming. My work locates itself in the personal while seeking the threads that bind local to global, personal to universal; it listens for the humming just beneath the background of our everyday lives.

Through my practice I draw on multiple cultural histories in order to investigate broader global concerns including nationalism, identity, history, memory, borders, and the comfort and unpredictability of home and world.

While much of my work is object-based in its inception and seeks new ways to speak beyond the original voice of the object, it also reaches into the affective modes of perception, and how our interactions are not simply cognitive and cerebral, but also deeply rooted in our emotive and physiological selves. Frequently this calls for the creation of larger scale multimedia installations in order to charge the work with a multiplicity of evocative possibilities. While object based work may speak with a singular voice or the messy chatter of the many, my aim is to develop a language of historical, spatial and temporal intersections, and to use this language to bridge difference and otherness.

— Katayoun Amjadi

Bio

Katayoun Amjadi is an Iranian-born, Minneapolis-based artist, educator and independent curator. In her artworks, she often considers the social systems that continually construct the binaries which shape our perceptions of Self and Other, such as religion, gender, politics and nationalist ideologies. Katayoun is interested in blurring these boundaries and create a balanced hybrid style both in life and art. Her art is an attempt to understand the relationship between past and present, tradition and modernity, and individual versus collective identity, as well as to spur discussion about our understanding of time and the tangled roots of our histories. She holds an MFA in Ceramics and Sculpture from the University of Minnesota and currently teaches Visual Art courses at Normandale Community College. Her work has been exhibited in several group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including Minnesota Museum of American Arts, Rochester Art Center, Instinct Art Gallery, Weisman Art Museum, Soap Factory, Saint Thomas University, Public Functionary, Beijing Film Academy, Karlsruhe Art Academy and 7Samar Gallery in Tehran. Amjadi is the fiscal year2015 and 2019 recipient of the Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She was born in Tehran, Iran, and resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and maintains a studio in the Q.arma building in NE Art District.