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Artist Spotlight with Ala Dehghan Installation at James Fuentes, New York 2022.

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Artist Spotlight with Ala Dehghan

Posted: Feb 17, 2023

ArteEast is pleased to present an interview with artist  Ala Dehghan as part of our Artist Spotlight series.

Ala Dehghan received her MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale University, and her MA and BFA in Persian Miniature Painting from Tehran University and Alzahra University in Tehran. She has presented solo and collective work at the Queens Museum, The Kitchen, Leslie Lohman Museum, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, James Fuentes, Kai Matsumiya, Thomas Erben Gallery, Alyssa Davis Gallery, Stellar Projects, and Sargent’s Daughters in New York; Vox Populi in Philadelphia; The Delfina Foundation in London; Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Paris; and Isfahan Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran, among others. She founded 17 Essex gallery at the same address on the Lower East Side from 2016 to 2021. 

ArteEast: Can you tell us about your work in general and the main themes you return to in your practice?

Ala Dehghan: My work swings from meticulous miniature paintings inspired by eastern and Persian medieval manuscripts to expressive gestural mural drawings. The surface-scale shifts from architecture to a book, from handwriting to improvisation. The act of painting has to do with mechanics of transformation, transmutation and magic; anomaly and oddity that interrupt the habitual and settled everyday reality. Painting is a journey of a fool becoming a magician, or of a dreamer becoming an alchemist who gains the knowledge to transform materials and the self.

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نقاشی برایم زندگی در آن غیرممکن است. قدم برداشتن در آستانه‌ی شدن. نقاشی تنیده گی با تنهایی ست، گم شدن در آشوب روح و جسم. رویایی که تعبیر می‌شود. مستندی از زخم‌ها و دردها و تنش های جان و روان و تن. مرهم و گریزی از دردهایی که علاج ناپذیرند.همان رسوب واقعیت از حس ها، دردها و خاطرات ‌بر ذهن و بدن که خط و رنگ می‌شوند و فرم. گاهی میشود شعر. گاهی آواز زیر لب. نقاشی عشق به زندگی است. ثبت فی البداهه جهان در نقطه ای از زمان. امید برای جهانی بهتر. تکه هایی از زندگی که نماد میشوند و برای خودشان معنایی و هویتی خود انگارانه می یابند در بی زمانی. نقاشی جنگ برای زنده ماندن است برای وجود داشتن و شدن. نقاشی خوابی است که تعبیر می‌شود. تکه ای از زندگی که پیدا می‌شود در میان تمام آنچه که از دست رفته است. 

Creating paintings is the equivalent to dreaming for me, perhaps a dream that has already been interpreted. In fact, I remember my dreams during the act of painting. It is when I am documenting time, the moment and the action. It is a liminal space in which materials and thoughts meet to become forms. To me painting is chanting, praying and putting a spell on life. It has the potential to manifest what is imagined. Painting is inhabiting deep solitude, to reunite and connect the mind and the spirit with the body. It is indexical. It is a documentation of wounds, pains and tensions of the body. It can become a remedy for pains that are incurable. Fragments of reality that scratch the mind and body turn into lines, colors and forms. Then lines become words and language becomes poetry. 

AE: Tell us about some of the recurring imagery within your work and how it relates to the subconscious, poetics and the post-human?
AD: Each painting/pain-thing is an alchemical parable, a constellation of fluid symbols that creates a story within a story. To elaborate on a few of these components that recur in my work:

The Moon: the corporeal / the incarnating intelligence / phases of life and cycles of time
The Serpent: the spine /  the cerebral cortex / consciousness / knowledge
Eyes: witnesses / the martyrs /شهیدان
The eye: the authority / god / patriarchy
Chimeras: hybrid phantoms in the state of transmutation from organic natural fluid  forms of growing flowers and trees to monstrous giant planets and body fragments
One story: The red one is a character. A protagonist in one picture, and an antagonist in another. The red one is the self in a journey from one frame to another, either witnessing or revolting. The red one is also a self portrait that tells its own biography in visual parables. It appears as the fool who metamorphoses into a flower and maybe a stone. The red one can appear as a magician commanding the planets to move or in conversation with the speaking water rising up singing with a speaking tree. The Red One who is guilty for being a fool or for being a child can form a drop in another picture and then come back and rest under a speaking tree where its branches turn into fingers in motion from which 3 roses bloom under a vast blue sky. 

زمان در آستانه. خواب، خواب و بیداری، بیداری خواب آلوده .. زمان گمشده .. بدن های از یاد رفته .. حرف های نزده.. فریادی در سکوت. نقاشی فوران احساس است بدون صدا اما در آن همه ناگفته ها را می‌توان شنید. نمادها صدا می‌شوند و میپیچند. کاغذ و دست ابزاری برای ترجمه کردن روح .. بسان جادوگری که روح احضار می‌کند. چیزهایی که میایند و میروند از خاطره تاریخی و جمعی.. شدن در زمان و هیچگاه تثبیت نشدن .. مثل طبیعت بودن .. آینده ای که در گذشته تعریف می‌شود … مسخ اینحال دگردیسی 

Time is at hand. Painting for me is waking up from a dream, once sweet, another time bitter. It gives voice to lost and forgotten bodies, to the unseen and unspoken. It is a cry in silence. It is an outpouring of feelings in which you can hear all the unsaid. It takes your hand to show you other worlds and possibilities. Symbols sound, twist and evolve around each other and shapeshift. Paper and hand connect and re-unite to translate the voices of spirits and the ghosts in the mind. The witch who summons a spirit is present in the room. It is feminine, organic, natural and emotional. It is humane. The future does not necessarily have to be technological and digital, there is this possibility for all of us to choose a return to nature. It is our choice as humanity to make but there will always be a future, with or without us. In my paintings the utopia gets demystified in our integration with nature and a return to esoterics and the ways of the past. Painting is historical and collective. Fragments of memories in times that reveal the historic metamorphosis of animate and inanimate beings and things to free the revolutionary forces of bodies, beings and places in autonomy. 

AE: You founded and ran 17ESSEX Gallery from 2016-2021. What drew you to founding your own gallery? What did you seek to accomplish and in what ways do you believe that you succeeded?

AD: From the days when I was a child back home in Iran, making art, drawing and painting was a form of mutual aid and co-existence. Home was a place to resist. I grew up with my mother, grandmother and my sister. We had my mother’s students and friends come over regularly to have social gatherings and political discussions, as well as to make things, to sing and to cook. She was creating this radical political space as a home that was inclusive for those who were excluded from other social spaces. Her house became a sanctuary for bodies to empower and protect each other, even animals were seeking shelter there. My mom’s home was a sacred haven for friends from other cities and family members who were socially and politically outcasted. She always made sure that everyone felt safe and protected; no one was a stranger in her mind. 

In essence, we were creating and living an impossible reality, something that was forbidden. I started music and singing early on but I couldn’t sing freely in public. Even at home I had to sing in a pile of fabric or in pots so as not to be heard by the neighbors who would have considered it as haram. When I turned 16 my mother was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer which she battled for 7 years. It was at that time that I started to paint and draw every single day. I found out how my hand became a mediator of my emotions and suffering. All that couldn’t be said and sang became lines and colors and shapes. It was as if I started to secretly document my pain and my life…as if I was screaming it all in silence without being worried of anyone hearing me. Painting became an act of healing. The dynamic has changed through the years, what never changed is that Art has been always liberating and life-affirming. For me it has acted as an alternative system and has created an autonomous zone outside of the status quo. After I opened my gallery, I realized that it was as though my mother had channeled her will and energy through me so that I could make what seemed impossible, possible. Creating systems of resistance and mutual aid. The work was a homage to my mother’s life and I think it was successful in that. During the pandemic as the world started to change drastically and due to living in a hyper capitalist society that is also unjust and discriminative, I had to stop pursuing  my dream in that form and pursue better tactics to resist and exist.

 

استقلال و بی نیازی
غیرممکن را ممکن کردن
ساختن آنچه تو را برایش مجبور به انتظار کشیدن می‌کنند
گذشتن از سدها
همکاری, همیاری, دستگیری
کمک متقابل
عشق به همنوع

 

AE: What role does radical activism play within your practice? In what ways do you see your work as political?

AD: We have learned to resist in a world full of suffering, experiencing traumas and turbulence in histories where nature along with our bodies are politicized. Most forms of opposition are controlled so criticality and thereby radicality is crucial as we mobilize together. Radical actions resist any stagnation and compromise. Painting is also a form of resistance, like an impromptu recording of time. It is a kind of hope for a better world or a utopia that seeks itself in the resurrection of the past and the present moment to build the future historically. In painting fragments of life become symbols that create a new form of mapping and understanding of the reality/actuality. A world in which things are all united to resist destructive forces. The index of time becomes an image everlasting and eternal. The act of painting is to survive, to resist, to exist and to transform in which suffering, transformation and healing are all intertwined. It is a piece of life that is found in the midst of all that is lost. 


Like every true prophet,

the artist is the unwitting mouthpiece

of the psychic secrets of his time,

and is often as unconscious as a sleep-walker.

He supposes that it is he who speaks,

but the spirit of the age is his prompter,

and whatever this spirit says

is proved true by its effects.

(Jung 1932/1978b: 122–123)

AE: You began teaching Painting at RISD in 2022. Can you speak about your experience teaching? How has the act of teaching and conversing with students taught you something in turn or influenced aspects of your practice?

AD: It’s been a blessing to commute from New York City to Providence which literally means divine supervision and protection, manifesting itself in many ways in my life. I also started my first job as a teacher when I turned 17. In that summer, I taught pottery to children. We also went walking in the garden where I took pictures of the children and laughed so much together. With my first salary, I paid for the framing of a painting I made for my mother. That was my first gift to her, a thanks for all she ever did for me. 

There are four stages of the Magnum Opus mirror; they are the four stages of alchemical transmutation and of psychological transformation: Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas and Rubedo. In psychological terms they are described as: Confession, Illumination, Education and Transformation

The process of experiencing education is transformative and includes both learning and teaching (receiving and giving equally). No knowledge gets stagnated in this process and everything circulates from one person to another which in a way also transforms the knowledge into a perpetually better version. Knowledge is not static but instead it is in constant motion. It’s evolving around us and itself at the same time, so we need to catch up with it and grasp it. Intergenerational bonds and friendships, or the exchanging of ideas and thoughts, are ancient cycles communicated to us by our ancestors. We learn how to create communities, to paint, to teach, to speak, to write, to curate, to organize and to love all together. Together we can practice what sisterhood and brotherhood means outside of the competitive capitalist and imperialist systems imposed on us. Our aim is to empower ourselves to imagine and manifest alternative modes of existence as artists and human beings on earth. Art education is no longer a systematic habit but instead it can be the process of creating a magical space from which to experience alternatives to our understanding of the intersection of matter, mind and spirit.

AE: What and who are some of your major creative influences, and why?

AD: From a very early time  in my life those who had an impact on me were my mother and my grandmother. My mother was an artist, curator, collector and she opened the first women’s art school in the city I grew up in, Karaj. Other things that have greatly impacted my psyche from a very in early age are:
Forough Faroukhzad’s poetry, Gargoyles, medieval Persian miniature painting and illuminated manuscripts. Mohammad Siah-Ghalam (The Black Ink) محمد سیاه قلم who was an anonymous painter and a black shaman in central Asia and Iran from around the 15th century. Kwaidan, a 1964 Japanese anthology horror film directed by Masaki Kobayashi, Maya Deren’s films, The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hrdayat and all its surreal imagery and stories,  Religious iconography, The Conference of the Birds by Attar and Faust by Goethe.

AE: What are you currently working on and do you have any shows or projects upcoming in 2023-2024?

AD: These days, I am working on an ongoing series since 2020,  a constellation of small scale paintings and sculptures. I have also started working on a new body of DIY wall newspapers known as روزنامه دیواری that includes texts and images using the logic of collage and montage. We used to create these DIY wall paper with other children back in elementary and secondary school as a form of focused project / research project.  This form resonates a lot with the current historical moment in which I am investing more and more of my time reading and translating between Farsi (Persian) and English.

Currently, I have some work curated by Ala Yunis at The Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India, which is on view until April 10, 2023. I am also a part of a group show called “Social Photography” curated by Peter Scott at Carriage Trade in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I have just been invited to participate in The Immigrant Artist Biennial (TIAB) that will take place in fall 2023 in New York City. I am also working on a DIY book of my own painting and poetry. 

 

ALA DEHGHAN ONLINE

Website: aladehghan.net

Instagram: @aladehghan 

 

*Some sections of the interview include answers in Persian at the request of the artist.

 

 

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