Sarfaraz, Sayeh

Arrayed in vast installations, Sayeh Sarfaraz’s motifs involve various materials, scales, and levels of language, impeding a facile reading of Middle East politics. Her visual stories have a bitter taste of reality and resonate undeniably with current events. Although they are directly related to the context of the Islamic regime in Iran and the dictatorship of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, they also refer to other situations in which political agitation and popular movements are disrupting communities: elections contesting the democratic process, censorship and imprisonment of journalists, public executions, torture, mass demonstrations, and so on. In Sarfaraz’s works, this accumulation of political referents and issues must be regarded not so much as an attempt at exhaustive cataloguing but more as the making of a moving Pandora’s box. The contemporary evils that escape from it are thus combined in an intractable and uncompleted inventory, activated through the intermediary of toys, naïve drawings, or words. Extracting violent conflicts and insurrections from the box of the world, Sarfaraz expands her gesture by transforming this political inventory into new imaginary forms in which toys and drawings act as pretexts for leading viewers toward an ambiguous story, a slippery fiction. The naiveté of the childlike figures is thwarted, their familiarity eclipsed, to leave room for intriguing characters. Although childhood is never far away, it has now lost its innocence. Excerpt of text by Claire Moeder