Iranian Beauty

source: stadtgaleriede

For the artist, who was born in German, Iran is a place of her origins—but not her homeland—and at the same time her most important object of study. Her performance and video works testify to a self-confident and self-critical but always humorous view of the relationships and discrepancies between private and public reality.

Anahita Razmi (b. 1981 in Hamburg) has already received well-renowned awards, including recently the Emdash Award der Frieze Art Fair in London. Currently the artist is living and working Los Angeles, with support from the renowned MAK-Schindler Scholarship.

The Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken is presenting the first extensive exhibition of Anahita Razmi’s work, focusing on her most recent photographs and videos: In January 2013 the artist’s performance Re/Cut Piece in Dubai was a reenactment of the legendary performance Cut Piece by Yoko Ono (1964). Cut Piece was a process of laying bare, which took place in immediate exchange with the audience and made palpable the physical boundaries between viewers and artist, between attackers and victim, and also between male viewer-subject and woman as object. With Re/Cut Piece, Razmi transferred the original performance from its feminist context of the 1960s to contemporary Dubai.

Earlier, in 2011, Razmi made the performance Roof Piece (1973) by the American choreographer Trisha Brown the point of departure for a similar transfer. Whereas Brown turned the roofs of downtown Manhattan into a stage for improvised dance movements, Razmi used the political significance of Teheran’s roofscapes as the site of revolution in 2009 for her choreography. For reasons of safety, however, her Roof Piece Tehran could not be experienced as a live performance, as Trisha Brown’s piece could, but was first presented to the public by the artist as twelve video sequences from the piece at the Frieze Art Fair in London.

In her works I’ve Got It All (Too) (2008), Walking Drunk in High Shoes (2010), and HellterFuckingSkelter (2012–2013) by Tracey Emin or VB67 (2011) by Vanessa Beecroft, Razmi referred to early works by famous women artists. This effort to come to turns with legendary examples from recent art and film history runs through Razmi’s entire oeuvre, such as her latest video, Iranian Beauty, which is being shown at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken for the first time.

A catalog accompanies the exhibition: Swing State, ed. Kunstverein Hannover and Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, 2013, 84 pp. (Ger./Eng.) with texts by Andrea Jahn, Ute Stuffer, and René Zechlin.
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source: artsynet

Digital and performance artist Anahita Razmi mines her Iranian cultural heritage and appropriates iconic works of art—particularly those of feminist artists—bringing to them a new Eastern context. She is best known for Roof Piece Tehran (2011), a video installation for which Razmi recreated Trisha Brown’s seminal 1971 work Roof Piece, filming 12 dancers not on the rooftops of New York but on those of Tehran—a reference to the rooftop demonstrations during Iran’s 2009 election protests. “My works are always conceptual and political but they also have a sense of humor,” she has said. For Re/cut Piece, a re-enactment of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), Razmi wore a black Gucci dress and invited an audience in Dubai to cut it off her body. In other works Razmi has referenced Tracey Emin’s quilted textiles and Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits.
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source: flashartonlineit

L’artista Anahita Razmi – lavora con il video e la performance – è stata proclamata la vincitrice del Frieze Art Fair’s Emdash Award. Il premio dà la possibilità a un artista di realizzare un lavoro che sarà esposto durante i giorni della fiera. Il lavoro della Razmi si ispira alla coreografia di Trisha Brown Roof Piece (1971) e si ricollega alle proteste che si sono tenute a Tehran dopo le elezioni presidenziali iraniane. Sarah McCrory, curatore di Frieze Project, ha affermato che la proposta vincente si è distinta per la sua profondità e forza provocatoria.