NYAB Event - Aphrodite Désirée Navab "She Speaks Greek Farsi"

Aphrodite Désirée Navab "She Speaks Greek Farsi"

Soho20 Chelsea Gallery

This event has ended.

In this photographic performance series, Navab’s abdomen serves as the site of performing language. An expression in Greek, to speak any language in a “Farsi way”, is a comment on how fluent and well someone speaks that language. So to speak “Greek Farsi” or “English Farsi” is to speak Greek or English well. By implication and inspiration, if such a compliment exists today (despite the ancient
history of war between the Greeks and the Persians), then other similar signs of respect between antagonistic nations might be possible.

From the concrete world of her embodied experience, language is abstracted. At once personal and universal, private and public, Navab writes words on her skin from the flesh of her own tri-cultural heritage. Words whose meanings, however, hold great potency for anyone who has had to relocate and emigrate: family, place, language, love, friend, birth, land, home, person, history, life, memory, body, self, and world. These fifteen concepts were chosen as the most re-defined issues in her life’s transitions and
translations from Iran, to Greece, to the United States of America. Navab writes and erases on her abdomen, building a memory of marks, and ritually reenacting the erasure and the remembering brought on by forced migration. The Greek and Farsi words come from opposite directions, but meet in the middle, creating a calligraphy that travels somewhere between private graffiti and public tattoo. Against the backdrop of the political tensions between Iran and the United States, Navab’s work stands as an alternative interaction between differing cultures to the usual domination or demonization.

Media

• Photography
• Prints

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