Anahita Norouzi: de- +‎ patterned: a space in-between

Opening Reception & Performance; June 26th 2018, 6-9pm

Performance begins at 8pm

Duration: June 27- 30 2018, daily 2-7pm

SomoS Art House Berlin is proud to present a multimedia installation from Iranian-Canadian artist Anahita Norouzi titled “de- +‎ patterned: a space in-between,” taking place June 27-30th 2018. In this presentation, the artist draws from her own personal archive of memories, texts, and family stories to revisit and at times revise the historical events surrounding the Iranian Revolution and the unlawful incarcerations that occurred both before and after regime change. Text, images, video, and objects are interwoven to create an unstable narrative to be decoded by the viewer and which will be elaborated upon during a performance by the artist on the opening night.

Likening the institutionalized suppression of history with the internalized process of memory repression, Norouzi uses the power of her own writing on the events from her family history and the power of photographs to invoke memory. She juxtaposes objectivity in the form of factual accounting of events and geography with the speculative and counterfactual recounting of secondhand information passed down from her father. The imperfection and ambiguity of memory is both an effect of the traumatic relationship with the past and a source to draw from to create a newly imagined narrative that is no more or less real than what may have actually taken place.

“In this project, I try to frame the most obscure zones of memory’s fragility and fill in the gaps in recollection. I create a distorted temporality of inconsistency between past and present and I then put the subject of memory, of recollection, into an experimental situation. What we see in this work, is that the history I tell—via memory—is itself a narrative of the past that charts the trajectory of how one’s self came to be.”

— Anahita Norouzi, Artist’s Statement

Norouzi’s work at SomoS aims to create a new narrative framework that is parallel to reality. With the historical and political knowledge she has accumulated in the two countries she has lived in, she rewrites history to generate a chain of speculative events that manifest in the multimedia installation combining text, image, and video in the exhibition space at SomoS. This exhibition marks Norouzi’s first exhibition in Berlin and the first time that her unique method of historical interpretation can be seen in Europe.

Anahita Norouzi (b. 1983, Tehran) is originally from Iran and now lives between Tehran (Iran) and Montreal (Canada). She is an accomplished artist and academic holding advanced degrees in Fine Arts and French Literature from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She has lectured extensively on the subject of her own art in relation to identity, migration, trauma, and memory studies. She was also a finalist for the Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize with work exhibited at the Royal College of Art in London and in Dubai in 2013. She has exhibited her work across Canada and extensively in Iran.

Her conception of art is closely related to social, political and cultural issues, that she aims to critically explore in her works. Her artwork often addresses the issues of memory and identity from a psychohistorical perspective. She investigates these concepts in relation to her dichotomous condition as an Iranian citizen and a distant observer at the same time.