Born 1974 in Tehran, Iran, residing in Zurich
The imaginative world of Shirana Shahbazi is often morbid and clearly made up of kitsch, but it is art all the same. Why is this? This artist who was born in Tehran, grew up in Germany, and lives in Zurich, was originally a photographer. Influenced by the German school of pragmatic photography, represented by Bernd and Hilla Becher in Düsseldorf, Shahbazi focuses her lens on the random pedestrian, on the countryside, cities, as well as surfaces arranged with coloured paper that produce abstract photos. The author became known for her still-life photos of skilfully arranged fruit, flowers, pearl necklaces and shells. Unique to the colourful compositions were her shots of colourful butterflies or minerals on monochromatic backgrounds, such as pink. Although shot with an analogue camera, these photos show an unusual, almost abstract ornamentality that in some way resembles the blazing patterns of oriental rugs, and on the other hand, the Baroque sheen familiar in paintings by Dutch painters of the 17th century. Shahbazi, always starting from photographs, has Iranian billboard artists paint huge billboards based on her photos, where it is sometimes difficult to tell if it is a painting or a photo. And she sometimes commissions Persian weavers to weave the motifs from her photos on the surface of rugs.
Shahbazi’s motifs, appearing on radiant red, yellow or blue backgrounds, are alluring and fascinating. In such a way, they are similar to advertisement photographs, appealing to the hedonism of the contemporary consumer. These motifs are also explicit in their symbolic testimonies. The lustre of pearls, the transience of blooms and fruit, and the morbidity of skulls that often appear in her compositions were all motifs of paintings in the 17th century reminding us of human mortality. Memento mori – Remember your mortality – and this is all just a transient sheen. Nevertheless, it is a sheen that fascinates – in fact, the testimony of Shahbazi’s pictures that she skilfully exhibits could be formulated in such a way. It is as if the horror of mortality and the alluring sheen that helps us forget about this mortality emanate from this world at the same time. And because they confront the audience with this paradox, Shahbazi’s carefully constructed photos are real art. Shahbazi explains, “Photography always moves between authenticity, construction, and choice, which is an act of balancing that makes up the artistic medium of photography for me.”
Text by Noemi Smolik
