Raheleh Filsoofi Exhibit
Raheleh Filsoofi
On Transcending the Inhibited Space
The exhibition consists of two, related installations by the Iranian-American artist,
Raheleh Filsoofi. Her career is rooted both in Iran and
the United States, and her work spans the gulf between the culture of ancient Persia
and international trends in art as they are interpreted in
the Americas. Her conceptual approach to art, which features video and sound, enables
her to address important contemporary issues, such as
border immigration and cultural communication. She is fascinated by the role that
place has in one's identity and how visual and aural stimuli serve to define it.
The Inh(a/i)bited Space
Multimedia Installation, 2018
The Inh(a/i)bited Space invites the viewer to delve into the artist's personal recollections of senses, sound,
and space. Her handmade
vessels of memory, which present site-specific sound-bites, confront the paradox of
inhibited and inhabited space in the wake of current
socio-political immigration policies. The vessels with wires leading from one to the
other, like the rhizomatous structure, collectively perform a
symphony of melodic and ambient sound. The installation disrupts the viewer's sense
of utopia with the rhetoric of the travel ban and its
progeny: disorientation, anxiety, and psychological displacement.
The Imagined Boundaries
Multimedia Installation, 2016
The Imagine Boundaries utilizes video within spaces that are created by wooden boxes
of different shapes and sizes. The arrangement compels
the viewer to explore the idea of imagination and reality in three dimensions. What
is real and what is not? How do we know what we
know? The system is a metaphor for the communities into which our society is organized,
a labyrinth of closed spaces where people of
different cultures struggle to interact and communicate. From gated communities to
less physical, cultural boundaries, our society is rife
with boundaries, obstacles in space and comprehension for those that have been here
for a long time and those that have just arrived. The
installation brings to the fore the confusion that can arise in such circumstances.
It is a vision of human existence in which the
constitution of identity, the notion of the self, the misunderstanding of otherness,
are all part of an individual's daily experience. Each box is a
zone of control or abandonment that the viewer is trying to cross. There is a contrast
between what the viewer sees first and what he or
she is able to discover inside through video. On the one hand, the installation functions
as organized chaos, while on the other it creates
opportunities for the viewer to cross boundaries. The elegance of this installation
is to pay homage to the spirit of interfaith and intercultural
dialog that was promoted by Safa Khaneh Community in Isfahan in Iran in 1902.
About the Artist
Raheleh Filsoofi is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Texas, South Florida and
Iran. She is an active participant in juried art exhibitions both in Iran and the
United States, including the recent solo exhibition 'Imagined Boundaries'- a multimedia
digital installation on border issues, consisting of two separate exhibitions debuted
concurrently at Florida Cultural Consortium and Abad art gallery in Tehran (2017);
'Dual
Frequency' group exhibition at The Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida (2017)
and a Group Exhibition 'Fragile' at The
Contemporary Art Museum of Isfahan, Iran (2016). She has been the recipient of various
grants and awards such as the prestigious South
Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists funded in part
by the National Endowment for the Art and The Dave
Bown Project Award (2016). She is an assistant professor of ceramics at University
of Texas Rio Grande Valley at the Department of Art. She
holds an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Florida Atlantic University and a B.F.A. in Ceramics
from Al-Zahra University in Tehran, Iran.