SARA RAHBAR
- Details
- On Wednesday, 11 April 2012 18:15
Restless violence 2011 / Mixed Media
SARA RAHBAR is an artist born in 1976 in Tehran, Iran but now lives and works in New York. Through installations, photographs and sculptures, each assigned a movingly poetic title, she outwardly communicates her ongoing internal dialogue about the world around her.
She travels back-and-forth between Tehran and New York, as well as through cities in between, obsessively collecting a multitude of textiles and found objects, including such aggressive and powerfully symbolic objects as gasmasks, prosthetic limbs, weapons, flags and forceps. She then mixes and arranges these items together to create a new beautifully calm context that surprisingly evokes more ideas of peace than war.
“Kurdistan flag #5″ (2007); Textiles/Mixed Media
Comfortably Numb /Mixed Media
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.
Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, including Cairo, Mumbai, Dubai, Madrid, Vienna, Moscow, New York, London and Paris. It is also 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.
love left as easily as it came, darkness fell and we had no one left to blame
/Mixed Media
Artist Statement:
“Its 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.
