Shadi Harouni (b. 1985, Hamedan, Iran) is an artist based in New York and Tehran. Her practice includes video installations, architectural interventions, sculptures, photographs, prints, and archives. Her work, set often in cemeteries and quarries throughout Kurdistan, are close studies of a history of dissent and resistance in the region.
The themes Shadi Harouni addresses are rooted in the history of her native Iran; she often engages in a play with language to connect this history to a universal experience of loss, repression, recovery and defiance. Her work centers on the politics of space and of the gaze, and the tension between the moment of revealing and that of concealment. Her work often evokes a relationship between fullness and cavities, taut with the tension of hiding and the desire to reveal.
“For those who remember and keep hope, what has been destroyed or cast into oblivion nonetheless resurface in monuments that are, themselves, expressions of forgetting and despair. I collect facts on how power attempts to erase and abolish, and on the kinds of ingenuity and strategy the individual employs to resist full erasure. I dissect and mimic these strategies in video installations, architectural interventions, sculptures, photographs, prints, and archives. My works draw on a history of sacred images and architecture, entangled with modern excesses in politics and representation. My images and sculptural forms attempt to give body to that which has been reduced to surface.
My experience of a post-war/revolution Iran and the Islamic Republic’s uncertain and antagonistic relationship to images, music, fashion and human bodies (both dead and alive) has been a starting point for my work. I study the subtle and intricate ways in which power bans, masks, and negotiates. Power bans people, places, thoughts, and much more, but also relies heavily on the individual to creatively hide and self-censor, a dialectical relationship that inevitably provides space for dissent and resistance. Much of what I do as an artist examines this relationship”.
Shadi Harouni works with obstinate forms, objects, and people that push into the space inside of walls and stones, awaiting a rupture in history to allow them back into the light. Her work is concerned with the politics of space and looking.
Her research centers on the metaphysics and absurdities of hope alive in dead bodies, forbidden objects and forgotten histories.
Harouni supplements theoretical inquiries with interviews, reenactments, and chance encounters that help unearth lost narratives.
