ANDISHEH AVINI : HOMESICK
FEINKOST, BERLIN
APRIL 30 - JUNE 21, 2009
FEINKOST is pleased to announce the first solo presentation in Germany of New York-based artist Andisheh Avini. Entitled “Homesick” the exhibition analyzes the infamous homecoming of the Ayatollah Khomeini that followed the ousting of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The resulting barrage of imagery becomes a dense storyboard of momentous fervor frozen in aspic. This cycle of nearly 80 newly produced silkscreen paintings construct a visual language around the transformation of Iran in the spring of 1979.
Avini’s artistic practice ranges from painting and sculpture, murals and installation. His subversive palette of materials culls anything from antique parlor house paintings and earth from the holy site of Mecca to classical craft-based techniques, each somehow specific to an idea of Iranian sensibility, history, identity, and memory. Through a conceptual instrumentalization of his Iranian background, his work often references itself and questions of his own identity superimposed unto flickers of a collective one.
In this current body of work the printing ink becomes a palimpsestuous muck of forgotten flashes and front-page archetypes. Silkscreening’s capacity for exact reproduction is taken for granted and foregone for its capabilities of pure abstraction. The repetitious use of the printer’s screen onto the canvas renders many of the archival images abstract and illegible. In certain paintings permeable fragments of riots and zeal seep through almost subliminally.
By furthering a mode of history painting associated almost exclusively with Andy Warhol, Avini’s approach is as much about technique as it is the brain’s processing and projection of yearning, memory and afterimage. This personalization of a complicated period of history offers a timely reflection on the exactitude of how we remember and what imageries define our memories.
