Dubai,
Unit 17, Alserkal Avenue Street 8, Al Quoz 1 PO Box 18217 Dubai, UAE
25 October - 1 December 2011
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde is proud to present ‘Obscure Stream of Life, But I’m Still Having My Afternoon Cuppa’ by Bita Fayyazi from October 25 to December 01, an exhibition of new works continuing the Dubai gallery’s long-running association with the Iranian sculptor and installation artist.
For her new show, Fayyazi continues to deal with fundamental ideas and concepts that have underpinned her previous two, critically-acclaimed shows Performance 1388/2010 and Grind, in which society at large is assessed and evaluated through an intensely personal prism of Fayyazi’s own emotions and feelings. The chaos and disorder of everyday life, the frailty and futility of thwarted human ambition and greed, set within a framework referencing structures of birth, life and decay, all refracted through Bita Fayyazi’s practice, here becomes a powerful set of artworks.
The nine mannequin pieces in the show, (‘oddities and hybrids’, according to the artist) continue Fayyazi’s formal investigations into seemingly disparate materials and found items, woven together with ostentatious care and prominent knots, ties and bindings. Balls of yarn, hair and wire mesh are wrapped to chimney hood vents, funnels, fiberglass, armatures and plaster, creating grotesque figures that ooze (literally, in some cases) with angst-ridden turmoil. In these figures, Fayyazi presses deformities, desecrations and physical exaggerations into service of her analogies of a ‘crippled, dysfunctional society’. The anger is resigned and philosophical, the mannequins are comically absurd in their twisted impotence and thwarted physicality.
There has always been an appealingly dark underside to Fayyazi’s work, since she burst into international prominence during the 1990s with her outsized ceramic cockroaches and various series in which man and beast co-exist suspiciously in an unforgiving global machine. In ’Obscure Stream of Life, But I’m Still Having my Afternoon Cuppa’, Bita Fayyazi again presents work that takes an uncompromising stance against social, political and emotional tyranny with wit, black humour and Fayyazi’s highly personalized love of craft, mythology and representation.
For her new show, Fayyazi continues to deal with fundamental ideas and concepts that have underpinned her previous two, critically-acclaimed shows Performance 1388/2010 and Grind, in which society at large is assessed and evaluated through an intensely personal prism of Fayyazi’s own emotions and feelings. The chaos and disorder of everyday life, the frailty and futility of thwarted human ambition and greed, set within a framework referencing structures of birth, life and decay, all refracted through Bita Fayyazi’s practice, here becomes a powerful set of artworks.
The nine mannequin pieces in the show, (‘oddities and hybrids’, according to the artist) continue Fayyazi’s formal investigations into seemingly disparate materials and found items, woven together with ostentatious care and prominent knots, ties and bindings. Balls of yarn, hair and wire mesh are wrapped to chimney hood vents, funnels, fiberglass, armatures and plaster, creating grotesque figures that ooze (literally, in some cases) with angst-ridden turmoil. In these figures, Fayyazi presses deformities, desecrations and physical exaggerations into service of her analogies of a ‘crippled, dysfunctional society’. The anger is resigned and philosophical, the mannequins are comically absurd in their twisted impotence and thwarted physicality.
There has always been an appealingly dark underside to Fayyazi’s work, since she burst into international prominence during the 1990s with her outsized ceramic cockroaches and various series in which man and beast co-exist suspiciously in an unforgiving global machine. In ’Obscure Stream of Life, But I’m Still Having my Afternoon Cuppa’, Bita Fayyazi again presents work that takes an uncompromising stance against social, political and emotional tyranny with wit, black humour and Fayyazi’s highly personalized love of craft, mythology and representation.
