Crossed

January 15 – February 21, 2015
Exhibition

About the Program

Guest curated by Makiko Hara, Ahmad Tabrizi's Crossed is a multi-media exhibition that creates a sense of portraiture compiled of Farsi script, piles of dressmaking pins, and glimpses of the artist himself—both visually and through audio. The installation addresses intellectual claustrophobia through language as a weapon of attack and defence; what is lost in the communication becomes loud sounds, weaponized sounds, sounds through the presence of pins. Pins are a universal symbol of pain, like a loud “ouch,” but silent at the same time. It is also a portrait, but reduced to just eyes and language. The self-portrait of pinheads, though there is no specific self, is perhaps a very oddball portrait—oddballs of displacement and misplacement and the “door” separating Us and Them. The Persian language written on the “door” is used as decoration or beauty (surface). The English is used as tag or brandification—one as “unknown,” one as insult/poetry or slogan of the collective experiences of refugees, the exiled, marginalized or what is “normally” perceived as “the Others.”

Curator

Makiko Hara

Artist

Ahmad Tabrizi

Identifier

2015.0115 CRO

Collection

grunt gallery Programming Archive

Location

grunt gallery (second location)
116-350 E. 2nd Ave, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V5T 4R8
Unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations

In copyright. For uses beyond Fair Dealing, research requests, corrections, takedown requests, or other inquiries, please contact grunt gallery: archives@grunt.ca