Post-script

Golnar Adili, Artist Statement

Golnar Adili plays with material and reflects on past traumas through a process of deconstruction and reconstruciton of her identity. To break things apart and put them back together without losing any pieces is to make them resilient while showing their scars. In this ultimately healing process of revisiting and reshaping memory, she has infused her practice with play, inspired by how her child observes and archives the world. Making connections between similar shapes and events is the foundation on which we build our vast internal library of the world. 

Adili was born in Virginia to activist parents fighting against the shah. Her family migrated to Iran in the wake of the revolution. Growing up in post-1979 Tehran in the face of seismic geopolitical shifts, Adili experienced uprooting and disconnection. Iraq’s sudden attack on Iran shortly after our arrival tightened the Islamic Republic’s grip on any political opposition, catalyzing her father’s eventual escape back to the US only two years after their arrival to Iran. In her art Adili is compelled to decode the ways in which these events have marked her. As such, She Feels Your Absence Deeply, presented here is an artist book in which images of letters, travel documents and significant family photos all from the time when her father escaped Iran are explored in a puzzle form. In My Mother’s Eyes, Adili’s mother’s gaze is enlarged from her passport photo telling of her mood in those uncertain and melancholy days. 

In the collage series presented, Adili plays with the form of her father’s arms extracted from photos. These were studies preceding the pillow series where she pushed transfered prints of his arms into batting covered with white sheets to exaggerate their outline.

Forgetting and relearning both English and Persian multiple times has made language a fascinating reference in Adili’s work. Persian poetry, as well as biographical text investigating a landscape of longing, have provided a valuable context for examining language formally. These investigations include physically building words and letters with a multitude of materials. In doing so, Adili uses architecture, book arts, and installation to distort and blur the lines between design, craft, and fine art. In Persian Alphabet Comparative From Archive and Prototypes, she sets out to design a simple type made of squares and cubes. She proceeds by physically making the whole set in Persian Alphabet Set. 

Following these language investigations, (Baabaa Aaab Daad)- Father Gave Water is an artist book in which a well known sentence is investigated. Baabaa Aab Daad is an homage to language and tactility made of wood block modules and is the first sentence children learn in first grad in Iran because of its basic sound and lettering properties.

Additionally, she has embedded in this book a small history of a wonderful man who further developed the first grade book and co-founded the nomadic schools in Iran. I decided to entangle him in the book since my research on the phrase “Baabaa Aaab Daad” brought him to the foreground. 

Poetry is the backbone of Iranian culture and resonates closely with the longing that Adili has experineced growing up. In a series of screenprints, she investigates the words benshinand and benshaanand, to sit and to seat someone, formally through repetition, and layering of tissue paper. These verbs set the tone in the poem Samanbouyan as they appear in the first verse of the Hafez poem, a 14’th century Iranian poet, and loosely translates to: as the Jasmine scented ones sit, they settle the dust of sorrow. To draw attention to their similarity and form, she proceeds to crisscross the verbs benshinand and benshaanand vertically in both the graphite drawing and later translated it three dimensionally in the 3D print.

Adili’s pixelated typography alleviates questions of calligraphy and infuses this classical text with a contemporary read activating the proceeding verbs of the poem through interlocking and pattern making. 

——————

Noah Breuer, Artist Statement

Noah Breuer’s artwork examines the visual legacy of his Jewish family’s former textile printing business, Carl Breuer and Sons, (CB&S)  founded 1897 in Bohemia. In 1938, Noah’s grandparents escaped Nazi subjugation, fleeing to America and leaving behind their extended family. As a Jewish-owned company, the CB&S was “Aryanized” under Nazi decree and confiscated in 1939. The seized factory soon began printing Nazi wartime materials. With astounding irony, in late 1941, the former Breuer factory began the production of innumerable Stars of David with the word “Jude” (Jew) printed in black onto bolts of yellow cloth. This transition in ownership and production is reflected in Breuer’s large screenprint, “Circus Folks and Badges.” It depicts a playful CB&S handkerchief design circa 1925, hovering over the repeating pattern of the “Jude” badges printed at numerous factories across Europe in the early 1940s.

In this exhibition, Breuer also presents a series of cast paper artworks created during a 2021 fellowship at Dieu Donné Papermill in Brooklyn, New York. These low-relief castings reference an assortment of animal forms which originally appeared as small, repeating motifs in several CB&S domestic textile designs from the 1910s and ‘20’s. Resurrected  and reimagined as sculptural forms, these new artworks now also reference ancient stone relief carvings. Paired with the cast paper forms are a menagerie of twelve laser-engraved clipboards which visitors are invited to use to create wax rubbings on paper inspired by the CB&S animal designs.