Sara Rahbar
Sara Rahbar (born 1976) is a contemporary mixed media artist.
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[edit] Life
Born in Tehran, Iran in 1976, lives and works in New York.
Rahbar pursued an interdisciplinary study program in New York from 1996-2000 and also studied at London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and design from 2004- 2005.
Her work ranges from photography to sculpture to installation and always stems from her personal experiences and is largely autobiographical. The first body of work that created international recognition for the artist was the flag series (2005-2011), in which traditional fabrics and objects are reworked as collages that form various incarnations of the American and Iranian flag, exploring ideas of national belonging, as well as the conflicting role of flags as symbols of ideological and nationalistic violence.
Rahbar’s work has been widely shown internationally, including Cairo, Mumbai, Dubai, Madrid, Vienna, Moscow, New York, London and Paris and is held in multiple collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Saatchi Collection in London, The Burger Collection in Hong Kong and the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, India.
[edit] Work
"When History Encounters Aesthetics"
Essay By Catherine Grenier
Director of Musée national d’art moderne / Centre Pomipidou
“Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude or any other anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” With these words, in 1890, Maurice Denis articulated what would be the maxim of Modernism, to be written about endlessly by critics and art historians thereafter. By ushering in an era in which paintings were analyzed according to form, he closed the door on iconographic and contextual interpretations, and put an end to what people in the modern scene referred to as “the subject.” ”(1)
In 2011, this idea is but a distant memory. Contextual interpretation has taken the place of formalist studies. This is evident when one reads articles and interviews about Sara Rahbar’s work. The majority of them focus on her primary motif, the flag, and on the particular context that arises from the artist’s birthplace and life story. And yet, unlike many artists who work with political issues, her work results from great visual refinement. In fact, the artist herself has often said that one should look at her works as paintings. Seen from this perspective, her work follows on from collage and assemblage practices. The first works for which she became known are, in terms of their technique, the descendants of Cubism and the Bauhaus just as much as they relate to the Neo-Dada assemblages of the European New Realists and Junk Art in the United States. In terms of aesthetics, one can discern traces of Pop art, a movement that, through the work of Jasper Johns, turned the US flag into a flat surface—like the conception of painting Maurice Denis was referring to. Finally, references to popular culture, its techniques, images and traditions—which have fueled modernity since Symbolism and Expressionism—form the primary resource of Rahbar’s compositions.
Sara Rahbar’s first works are assemblages of textiles sewn onto US flags. The artist has produced an important series of works, each of which is an encounter between the US flag and the emblems and materials of Rahbar’s native country, Iran. She uses real flags, installed vertically and horizontally, and sews a diverse range of materials onto them, while leaving the blue rectangle and its 50 stars untouched. These assemblages are composed of fine embroidered fabrics, bits of carpet, ornamental fringes, fragments of writing or whole texts, and, in some cases, yet more objects and images. She sometimes adorns the flags with other symbols of her adopted country: John and Robert Kennedy, military stripes, a crucifix. . . elements that all combine to form a lush surface, seductive with the colors and ornamental beauty of the fabrics. Aesthetics is thus crucial to understanding these works and is even one of the main factors in its effectiveness. Certainly, to inscribe fragmented memories of Persian culture on an emblem of the US carries a particular meaning, which becomes richer the more these various elements accumulate. But beyond the political, social and psychological meanings—determined ever since the artist’s first Flag, made in 2005—her work offers us a reflection on art and its ability to intervene in civic life at a specific register. A register that is not the only political statement, in which the intention and the demonstration take precedence over form, but the combination of this statement with visual formalization. Aesthetics, and its corollary, the sense of beauty, situate political discourse in a time that transcends the immediacy of the present, just as it transposes a local context into a universal space.
Throughout this series of nearly 50 works, Rahbar explores a range of hybrid forms on the backdrop of the flag, lending each one its own identity. Each flag is "dressed" differently, and its ornaments and decorations lead us to consider each composition as a kind of portrait. Portraiture is one of the themes that the artist focuses on. Among her works are numerous photographic portraits of women, from her own self-portrait, adorned with oriental fabrics and belted with a US flag, to images of women wearing the veil, hidden behind thick, printed textiles. In these images, the artist once again juxtaposes emblems of the US and Iran, in particular the flags of both countries. Before studying art at St Martins College in London at the beginning of the 2000s, Rahbar studied fashion design in New York. The influence of this early interest is still present in her aesthetics, whether it be these portraits or her Flags. Given how common the theme of the veiled woman is in contemporary discourse, Rahbar’s radically aesthetics-driven approach is original. Indeed, it make us realize that unlike the avant-garde’s mistrust of the seduction of form, beauty is now a mode of subversion that is just as pertinent as the violence that people once professed against beauty. Likewise, ornamentation, once thought of as mere decoration, proves to be a spontaneous means of expression by oppressed and marginalized cultures. It is, moreover, one of the shared borders between Western and Eastern art. ”(2)
The use of fabric and clothing in art has a history—discontinued but nevertheless significant—that runs the length of the 20th century. Formalist schools, advocating the abolition of borders between the arts, developed their research into textiles and costumes. The Bauhaus in Germany and the Vhutemas in the Soviet Union were particularly vibrant in this area, with Sonia Delaunay and Alexandra Exter standing out in particular. From the 1960s, installation and performance art practices considerably expanded the range of materials that artists could employ in their work. The use of fabric and sewing was not restricted solely to female artists. Hélio Oticica’s Parangole costumes, like James Lee Byars’ Dress for 500 (1968), are good examples of the diversification of disciplines and techniques. Be it assembled, sewn, twisted or stuffed with kapok, fabric was increasingly used in the experimental approaches of artists working in antiform and vernacular fields. Thus, from the work of Louise Bourgeois to Annette Messager, Claes Oldenburg and Yayoi Kusama, a whole category of soft forms came to inhabit the artistic arena. Apart from its use in sculpture and installation, the use of sewing was claimed by feminists such as Miriam Schapiro and Faith Ringgold, who went on to use sewing in politically critical works. Schapiro defined these works by coining the term “femmage” (female art of collage). Accordingly, she turned embroidery and patchwork (or quilting) into a paradigm of the feminine condition.
These two artists were pioneers of the art of patchwork. It is a technique intrinsically linked to the popular history of the US, whose emblematic presence in the American home has inspired many artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and Mike Kelley. Sara Rahbar’s Flags, despite their clearly Eastern components, also speak very directly to this model. In a very enlightening article (1), Géraldine Chouard recalls patchwork’s diverse connotations, which I will paraphrase here. Patchwork conveys the spirit of America, which likes to represent itself through the juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements welded into a unit. These assemblages of fabrics, often representing maps of the US with all the different states, are a cultural and geographical metaphor for America. In Lolita, Nabokov compared the geography of the US to a “crazy quilt”—one with no pattern or blueprint (2). Beyond geography, one can find the whole of US history and its various attitudes in these quilts, which are also used as “protest quilts” to defend certain civic causes. These works by women, which have accompanied the whole destiny of the American people, have seen renewed interest since the 1960s, and were honored with an exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1971.
Beyond US borders, patchwork, popularized by hippie movements, gained a more universal meaning and took on a metaphorical stature. Thus, in their book A Thousand Plateaus (3), French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used this folk art as an example of what they define as rhizomatic model of thought: “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.” This state of being, which is non-definitive, relational by nature and which articulates time and space, corresponds to the self-image that the US wanted to convey. Patchworks are compositions of fabrics of different origins and histories united by a common future that is stitched together by a needle. With no model of reference, but always associated with the major cycles and passages of life, patchwork is inherently imbued with movement and change. Many quilts evoke westward migration and the history of families traversing the American continent. “Patchwork—in conformity with migration, and with the affinity it shares with nomadism—will not only be named after trajectories, but will ‘represent’ trajectories, becoming inseparable from speed and movement in an open space,” recalled Deleuze and Guattari. Patchwork proposes the particular example of a visual form, which, in itself, regardless of what it may represent, and regardless of its constituent parts, encompasses multiple meanings. The product of a collective feminine practice, created in these “quilting parties,” some of these patchworks read as albums, while others have compositions of abstract, colored shapes. In the contemporary art scene, some artists are inspired by quilts to find models of composition based on dehierarchization, decentralization and rhythm. As a symbolic object, patchwork’s uses can be diversified. During the 1980s, the “Names Project” movement produced thousands of quilts bearing the names of those who had died from AIDS, often made from items of the victims’ clothing. These were displayed outdoors in front of the White House in 1987 as an enormous protest banner.
Rahbar’s Flags carry with them all the burden associated with patchwork: symbols of hybridity, the expression of heterogeneity, community projects, feminine practice, sites of memory. . . By using the starred flag as the backdrop, she guides the viewer toward this traditional American model. But the maze of oriental fabrics is also laden with another history and points to other models. The East is famous for its decorative compositions, as it is for its textiles and fabrics—precious commodities forever sought by the West. In this area, Eastern folk tradition is much older and richer than American tradition. Its influence has also been crucial for some modernist artists. Influenced by Aloïs Riegl’s writings on Islamic art, Matisse was one of the first to be inspired by textile designs and study the schedules and rhythms of ornamentation. Without directly using the fabric in his work, he collected oriental carpets and materials—an important source of inspiration. His curiosity, marked by the taste of the time for primitivism, pushed him toward the folk arts: Indian, Chinese, Persian and Arab fabrics, Turkish costumes. Even beyond their aesthetic qualities, these materials contain a sensitive, voluptuous nature that Matisse transposed to his pictures. One finds the same combination in Rahbar’s compositions. Together with the symbolic meaning of these compositions, the rich and shimmering universe of oriental fabrics lends her work an aesthetic quality and sensuality that serves her aims. Her work is imbued with the magic that is inherent to the use of historically charged materials and forms. It also refers to her immediate surroundings, where she finds the materials. The artist operates at the intersection of two traditions that art has often brought together—Eastern tradition and Western tradition—a feat she achieves by basing her work on her personal history, creating an aesthetic of mixing.
Sara Rahbar was born in Iran, but from the age of five she was brought up in the US. Fleeing because of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War, her family was torn between their home country and their adopted country. Her father, who went back and forth continuously during these years, eventually returned to Iran. Sara also made frequent trips there as a young adult, taking documentary photographs. For many years she divided her time between the two countries, the two cultures. In her work, themes of uprooting, disappointment with the “promised land,” dual culture, war, trauma and scarring refer directly to her personal experience. Though political, her work is no less intimate, committed as it is to the reelaboration of personal memories. Memories of childhood, family and a split identity are the soil that nourishes her work, which is mostly autobiographical. Her choice of fabrics marks the beginning of a process of research that, as she says, can develop thereafter through other materials—and this allows for two levels of reference: the intimate and the social, and the personal and the cultural. The patchworks that I referred to earlier reflect a collective history of mentalities in the US; they are also, in a manner of speaking, portraits of each of the women who made them. In many paintings and photographs of American families, these women chose to be portrayed holding their quilts, like pieces of clothing or emblems. Similarly, the entire set of Rahbar’s Flags—as well as new textile works that take oriental carpets or clothing as their basis—compose a portrait of the young artist. Through this body of work, her intellectual engagement and her emotional reactions are perfectly legible. Aesthetics is today the preferred site for the meeting and reunification of the individual and the collective, of autobiography and history. As an artist, Sara Rahbar is an heir to multiple heritages, both American and Iranian. Through her work she has chosen to address this fundamental multiplicity by speaking with a single voice. And she has achieved this by developing an easily recognizable script, or style, that shapes this multiplicity in her own personal form.
Another aspect of Rahbar’s artistic practice is her photography. Since 2005, she has done freelance work during her trips to Iran, and has contributed to documentary films. Her subjects are by turns political, social and cultural: since her first coverage of the election of president Ahmadinejad, she has touched on numerous subjects. However, the photographs she exhibits are very removed from the spirit and aesthetics of photojournalism. They are composed images born out of a dual perspective: performance—since the artist is often the model in these works—and painting. The performative element puts fiction at the heart of the composition, and at a register that is more allegorical than narrative. In any case, the artist says that it is her subconscious that dictates the images; these images impose themselves on her.
Through a series of 11 photographs entitled “Love Arrived and How Red” (2009), Rahbar tells the story of a marriage between a young woman, whom she plays herself, and an Iranian soldier. The artist initially wears a traditional dress, followed by a Western wedding dress with a US flag for a veil, while the soldier wears his military uniform. Both of their faces are concealed by black balaclavas. The relationship between these two people evolves from image to image, from the portrayal of a classic ceremony to a more performative scene in which the soldier lifts up the bride to inspect the flag—recalling the traditional inspection of conjugal bed sheets after a wedding night. In the final photograph, the bride, dead, holds a split pomegranate that spills its seeds on the ground. In this series, in which each image is characterized by a visual richness, the photographic conception is essentially pictorial. In each image, she imposes an aesthetic and invokes references that directly relate to the history of painting, to its frames and its rules. Symbolism and aesthetics are closely linked, both in how she depicts the characters and in her choice of costumes and attributes. Thus, for example, the iconographic motif of the open pomegranate is used in many compositions. A symbol of fertility, this “fruit of Paradise” from Iran is a traditional motif in Renaissance painting and Persian miniatures alike. The rich and picturesque feminine costumes, moreover, recall the models of Orientalist painting. Even though the photographs progress as a series, which is generally the case in her work, each is precisely framed and has its own artistic autonomy. As a result, the aesthetic and aestheticizing nature of her work should not be related to Pictorialism—that is, an aestheticization of the photographic image—but to a pictorial affiliation. The artist uses photography to organize the clash between two different registers: performance and painting. In doing so, she enters the tradition of the “tableau vivant” (living picture), a tradition that she rejuvenates by charging it with politics that have rarely been associated with it. With her carefully composed scenarios, she endows the vocabulary of political activism with a more general meaning and allows it to reach the level of historical painting. She, along with other artists of her generation, contributes to the regeneration of a genre that has fallen into disuse.
Thus, one of the major characteristics of Rahbar’s work is to restore the dialogue between history and aesthetics. Her originality is in bringing art—not only in its new forms, such as video and performance, but also in traditional forms that have been reappraised today—onto social and political terrain. With her Flags, as with her photographic compositions, or in turn her recent hybridizations that no longer take the flag as their basis but instead tarpaulins and bags used by US soldiers, she invents a new relationship to history. A rapport that is individual, moral, social and political. But also, above all, a rapport that is artistic, characterized by an aesthetic that is “always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”
1. Géraldine Chouard, “L'Amérique comme patchwork” (“America as Patchwork”), Revue française d'études américaines (“The French Review of American Studies”) n° 89, 2001, p. 70–85.
2. Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita, 1955, Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, p.150
3. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix, Mille plateaux, Minuit, Paris, 1980, p. 36. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus, Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.
[edit] Artist Statement
It’s about falling, standing and attempting to survive it all. In the end we are all in exile, we are all just visiting and we all come to this earth alone and we leave alone.
But while we are here we try so desperately to belong to something, to someone and to somewhere.
Metamorphosing and transforming for the means of surviving it all, our foundations lay, but our houses have burned to the ground.
Building castles in the sky, for a species that cannot fly, brick by limb we tear it down. Thinking that we are moving forwards, yet moving backwards all along.
Gajar woman and golden toys, we wait for dawn
