Rhonda Schaller Studio

Aphrodite Désirée Navab

Artist Statement

Through seventeen years of art practice I have learned that art is part myth, part reality, part fiction, part truth. But how to explore this rich paradox within my own art? This was the dilemma that motivated me to conceive of the Tales Left Untold (2000) series. I had already investigated issues of identity in earlier work, but I was coming to see that the way the photograph makes and breaks identities within the image itself is entirely another matter. The struggle, then, is to make photographs which comment on the very nature and culture of photography.

In this paradoxical and irreverent spirit, I dressed up in a traditional Persian outfit and explored hiding places. After traveling in the West of the United States, I found the recreated Mormon Pioneer town in Salt Lake City to be an ideal setting for exploring identity, playing roles, being known and unknown, telling and withholding. I never reveal all of me, nor all of the scene. In most of this photographic series, actually, only part of a feature or scene is shown, so as to allow more space for interpretation by showing less. Just as I have had to pick up the pieces of my identity along the way, so too, must the viewers of my exhibition turn the photographs into tales which make sense to them. My aim was to invite people to come and see this real and unreal world, this theater of identities. I tore the edges of all the photographs. I tore away at the straight documentary tradition of having to keep everything straight. I tore them to look like torn memories, torn identities–bits and pieces wanting to be whole. Tattered tales defy straight paths. Not to become larger straight angles, but to take on shapes not yet identified. Ultimately the tales are ways of a new North American, a Middle Eastern-North American woman trying to write her own myths within the older myths of North America.

In my subsequent series, I Am Not A Persian Carpet (2001), I challenge the ways that cultures have been reduced to commodities. Based on my observations in Europe and North America, it is not an exaggeration to say that in the West, the only thing known about Persian culture may very well be its carpets. In the United States specifically, all products from Iran were banned, the most lucrative ones––and, therefore, the most forbidden––being Persian carpets and caviar.

I printed my body with black ink from wooden printing blocks that have many of the motifs used in Persian carpets. At times it is difficult to tell where the “real” carpet on my floor ends and the “human” carpet begins. However, the full female body or self is never shown, only fragments. At the same time that I embody the stereotype, I challenge it by being disembodied, as each photograph shows bits and pieces of a female identity that defies neat categorization. There are hints and clues to a particular identity, but they are neither definite nor complete.

Through this series I hope to facilitate an encounter which will lead viewers to think deeply about the ways the Middle East has been stereotyped, where people have been turned into objects and categories. My photographs explore these issues in and of themselves, but also provide the space for others to debate them. At the same time that I am Not a Persian Carpet is a protest, it also serves as an invitation to ask difficult but necessary questions.

I did not know from where in my subconscious I had pulled out the title for my photographic series, Tales Left Untold (2000). Two years later, on my first trip back in over twenty years to my native country, Iran, I found out. In a closet full of dust and disorder, with books stacked desperately in every direction, in the house we deserted twenty-one years ago when we ran to the airport for our lives, on a shelf deep within my memory, I found my parents’ book, Tales Worth Retelling. This retelling of tales left behind has inspired my current solo exhibition, Re-Collecting Iran (2002-2004) which showed at the Grinter Gallery of International Art (Oct. 2004-Feb. 2005), traveled as a solo show to the Charles Culpeper Photography Gallery in New York city and then to the Louise Brown Gallery at Duke University. The installation embodies within its fabric both the process and product of my trip to Iran. It is a cultural re-collection of objects and memories left behind after twenty-two years of exile.

The installation consists of black and white photographs taken in Iran along with personal and cultural objects that I brought back with me to the United States. Each group of objects is organized on a pedestal with a group of images relating to three themes: Transit, Home, and Visual Cross-Culture. The installation uses the ethnography exhibit aesthetic of a natural history museum, to challenge this tradition of exhibiting the Other as strange, native, backwards, etc. Because I am exhibiting the self, I am doing auto-ethnography, studying a culture as a participant within that culture-- as a passionate, subjective and vulnerable observer not an objective one. Thus the objects on display have the look of a museum exhibit but are priceless only to the artist herself: from my first toys, bed sheets, and artwork that my family had deserted in Iran to contemporary Iranian popular culture items (like movie stars on key chains, photo and cinema magazines, etc.) that I brought back to share with the North American public

It is in the process of re-collecting, that I dislocate and relocate my place between the Middle East and North America. Each act of cultural re-collection provides a material reference for me after having had my first relatives, friends, home, language and culture torn from under me. Each installation places a foundation stone into a new home that I am building away from home, but always in critical dialogue with the memory of that first home. To be ‘unhomed’, as cultural studies theorist Homi Bhabha puts it, does not mean that I am ‘homeless’. Nor does it mean that I can be accommodated easily. By occupying two places at once, a cultural hybrid becomes difficult to place. It is within this ‘third space’ of working, contesting and reconstructing that the hybrid cultural identity creates an opening for other positions to emerge. This installation is a space of ‘unhomeliness’--a space of trans-national and cross-cultural initiations.

My most recent work, Super East-West Woman: Living on the Axis, Fighting Evil Everywhere(2005-present), uses humor to negotiate quite painful issues. The Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 in Iran replaced twenty-five centuries of monarchy with a theocracy, forcing over two million Iranians to relocate. This gave rise to the largest diaspora in Iranian history. The intense official animosity between Iran and the West over the past twenty-five years has bred a particularly bitter kind of alienation among transnational Iranians. In the aftermath of the revolution, Iran’s relationship with the West has only worsened. Iran’s new leaders branded the United States––the country to which the majority of Iranian expatriates fled––as “the Great Satan.” Twenty-three years later in 2002, the situation did not improve. President George W. Bush branded Iran as one of three nations comprising an “axis of evil.” For Iranians living in the West, the demonization of the Other becomes a daily negation of the Self. Being a member of both cultures, they are doubly reminded of their vilification through stereotypes and politics.

So I took my chador (the Persian word for Islamic covering) and turned it into a cape. The performance series began as a digital video which premiered at an international symposium at the University of Florida in April 2003 on the impact of Documentary X and XI which featured Yvonne Rainer, Gregory Ulmer, Raymond Bellour, Gertrud Koch and others. It then grew into its current manifestation, a photographic installation consisting of framed digital images of the performance.

The Superman figure of popular Western culture is transformed into a Superwoman, whose chador transforms in turn into a cape of agency. She pokes fun at herself, her two cultures, and the ludicrous situations in which her life, between East and West, has placed her. Cultural displacement has not left her incapacitated; rather, it has given her the capacity to live out her healing vision, in hope of eradicating the evil for which each region blames the other.
My art begins as a performance act in which I both act and direct. After documenting the performances through the camera, I then place them in an installation which invites viewers to participate in a new performance of discussion and debate against the texture of their own life histories.

The images document one performance but by being visual interpretations themselves in an installation they begin a new performance in relation to the new context and viewer. The installation enables the performance to continue and live on with each new viewer who is making sense of the original performance act. Super East-West Woman allows her audience to have a good laugh with her about the immaturity of name-calling, while addressing something that is not so funny, namely the demonization of the Other which paves the way for metaphorical and even literal occupation. Thus, Super East-West Woman aims to liberate both oppressors and oppressed by inviting intercultural dialogue.

Resume

Education

5/2004
Ed.D. in Art and Art Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, Dissertation title: “Unsaying Life Stories: A Comparative Analysis of the Autobiographical Art of Four Iranians.” It is the first study specifically focused on the photography and video of artists of the Iranian Diaspora.

10/2000
Ed.M. in Art and Art Education, Teachers College, Columbia University.

5/2000
M.A. in Art and Art Education, Teachers College, Columbia University.
• Studied with Graeme Sullivan, Judith Burton, Maxine Greene, Renee Darvin, Prabha Sahasrabudhe, Gerard
Vezzuso.
• New York State Teacher Certification.

6/1993
A. B. Magna cum Laude in Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University.
• Studied with photographers Chris Killip, David Goldblatt, Rosamond Wolff Purcell, Bill Burke, Barbara Norfleet.

Employment

2004-2006 Assistant Professor, College of Fine Arts, University of Florida.

2005 • Interview regarding Super East-West Woman series aired on CKUT public radio (Nov. 2, 6-7 pm) Montréal,
Canada.

Beginning through Advanced Photography: still, digital, color, small through large format, Visual Literacy, Interdisciplinary Studio: Art and World Feminisms, Art Education for Elementary School Teachers, Fundamentals of Art, Graduate Seminar: Photography and Electronic Intermedia.

College Art Association, National Art Education Association, NAEA Women’s Caucus, Society for Photographic Education, Society for Iranian Studies, Kappa Delta Pi: International Honor Society in Education.

Casoria Art Museum, Naples, Italy
Simone de Beauvoir Institute of Women’s Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
Harn Museum of Fine Arts, Gainesville, FL.
Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, FL
Museum of Fine Arts, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, AR.
Harriman Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY.

Robert Coles, Cambridge, MA
Bernice Steinbaum, Miami, FL.
Ghazel, Paris, France.
Sergio Vega, Gainesville, FL.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Cambridge, MA.
Maxine Greene, New York, NY.
Gregory Nagy, Boston, MA.
Graeme Sullivan, New York, NY.
Judith Burton, New York, NY.
Kendal Kennedy, New York, NY.
Sussan Babaie, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Barbara Jo Revelle, Gainesville, FL.

Sullivan, Graeme (2005), Art Practice as Research, London: Sage Publications, pp. 56-57.
–––––––––. (2002). “Ideas and Teaching: Making Meaning from Contemporary Art,” in Yvonne Gaudelius and Peg Speirs, eds., Contemporary Issues in Art Education. NJ: Prentice Hall, 23-37.
Pooja Shah, “Art Pushes Stereotypes Aside,” Temple News (Philadelphia), March 4, 2004.
“How is it Shadows I Knew You Not,” Columbia Record (New York), September 11, 1998.

Sussan Babaie (Department of Art History, University of Michigan. “The Conjunction of Identities: The Photographs of Aphrodite Désirée Navab.” Invited Paper for the Conference: Bicultural Ways of Knowing: Iranian-American Narratives, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, November 2, 2002.

Kendal Kennedy (MFA, Pratt Institute). “The Right Shade of Gray: Constructing a New Identity—Aphrodite Désirée Navab’s Photographs.” Special Session presentation at The Middle East Studies Association annual conference, San Francisco, Nov. 2001.