Helia Chitsazan: Forces of Change and Memory at Fou Gallery
Text / Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani
October 2024
In her recent body of work, New York-based Iranian artist Helia Chitsazan invites us to consider a contrast between forces that constitute change and the fundamental force of remembering. Memory and change often oppose one another, winds of change sweep away the time and the stasis it embodies. Chitsazan’s personal story of a recent immigrant trying to carve out an individual identity in the larger cultural and artistic American wilderness is related to both. And because memory takes on metaphoric meanings and is subjective by definition Chitsazan shows us the visual devices are most consequential to her. Breakdown of the third wall between an actor and the audience, masks as stand-ins for various identities, and micro-expressions as attempts to pin down what is slipping away – are all relevant to the artist, and characteristic of her works.
As Chitsazan comes from Tehran where she was born and raised her works allow us to reflect upon the idea of constructed knowledge and how it shadows and clouds our references and processes. In the Cartesian paradigm that underlies the western worldview, our perception of the world is what allows us to assert the reality of our existence. Yet, this western concept discounts all other ways of looking and seeing. We can’t understand a country as complex as Iran without understanding that political censorship and economic decline, public trials against independent cinematographers and human rights activists, public executions, and mass exodus of the population from the country — is the reality in which Iran has existed for the last generations. Thinking about this country and looking at the art without taking these political elements is quite esoteric. Chitsazan addresses the internal unrest in the country in a symbolic, indirect way by investigating stasis, distortions, and mirrors while connecting them to the questions of individuality. The artist expresses the ambivalence of identity questions for younger Iranian women as they try to forge new routes for independence within a society deeply rooted in traditional gender and class roles.
“We navigate multiple personas: one shaped by an Iranian upbringing, upholding traditional familial values; another, resilient and tactful, responding to societal pressures under the regime; and a third, the most authentic yet concealed, influenced by the ideals of freedom and the digital age. This hidden persona is expressed only in private, away from watchful eyes, with close friends. This is who I have always fought to be.” - Helia Chitsazan
Chitsazan creates an off-modern route for Iranian visual tradition using a definition first emphasized by cultural theorist Svetlana Boym. According to Boym off-modern recovers unforeseen pasts and ventures into the side alleys of modern history, opening into the modernity of “what if” and not only modernization as it is. Iranian Saqqakhana movement of 1960-1970s could be understood within the context of western modernism, but its references to Islam, the Old Testament, Zoroastrianism, and abstraction made it endemic and site-specific to Iran. Not necessarily positioning herself as the successor of this movement, Chitsazan understands and channels its transient quality of being an Iranian artist within the western art discourse. The Fou Gallery is now interspersed with reflective surfaces so that viewers can stop for a minute and observe themselves, albeit in a distorted manner. Only after confronting this distortion, we observe first-hand how western perception influences the culture.