In her preoccupation with crossing different visual forms and mediums, the still life dominates the work of Iranian artist Shirana Shahbazi. From the very beginning of her life as an artist, Shahbazi has devoted much of her work to expanding the boundaries of photography by using photographic motifs in other media, such as painting, graphic prints, or objects such as carpets. Her photographs of still lifes, based partly on works by the Old Masters, can be seen in both Paris and Rotterdam until early 2009.
Shahbazi's perception of things and her pictorial memory has been molded by the tradition of western painting. She skillfully exploits the compositional and iconographic elements of Dutch still life painting in her photographs. Fruits, animals and jewellery are meticulously arranged and reproduced, with the skull motif appearing as a symbol of vanitas.
In an echo of advertising photography, the objects in her still lifes are shot against a monochrome black background so that they seem like a seductive collection of products for sale - and in this process she reduces the original symbolic meaning of the still life. Even the skull seems like a semantically blank sign. No longer does it express the transience of all earthly goods but, in a hedonistic consumer world, is itself stylized into an object of desire. In parallel to this, Shahbazi has photographed individual mussels and insects against a monochrome backdrop. With an almost encyclopedic interest, she has rummaged through collections of natural history specimens and produced photographs of them that at first glance seem like morphological portrayals of shapes. It is of no interest to her to record the forms of nature systematically or classify them taxonomically. Rather she shows, by means of true-to-life documentation, that the objects in the picture cannot be seen in disassociation either from the context of their presentation or the manner of their depiction. At the same time, an artificial heightening of the motifs takes place, bringing about the paradox that natural-organic forms are mutated to abstract configurations that seem like handmade ornaments or "art forms".
Shirana Shahbazi was born in 1974 in Teheran, and now lives in Zurich. She has had solo shows at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Swiss Institute in New York, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover and at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva. In addition she has participated in many group exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad, including the 4th Berlin Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art in New York or Kunsthaus Zurich. In 2008 Shahbazi completed a Residency Program at UCLA's Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, which will conclude with a solo exhibition (20 December - 30 April 2009).
Birgid Uccia
Shirana Shahbazi
Until 18 January 2009
Museum Boijmans van Beuningen
Museumpark 18- 20
3015 CX Rotterdam
Shirana Shahbazi
Until 4 January 2009
Centre culturel Suisse
32 et 38, rue de Francs-Bourgeois
75003 Paris
Shirana Shahbazi
20 December - 30 April 2009
Hammer Museum
Los Angeles
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