Group Exhibition at Iranian Artist Forum
Plural Memory traces the afterlives of a figurative pedagogy that has often been sidelined in contemporary art’s suspicion toward technique and classical aesthetics. Rather than defending tradition, the exhibition asks how a shared training—its methods, disciplines, and ways of looking—survived by transforming: dispersing across contexts, mutating through new questions, and reappearing as multiple, independent practices. In the spirit of Jacques Rancière’s challenge to explanatory hierarchies, this pedagogy is approached not as an authority that fixes a single “distribution of the sensible,” but as a shared grammar—principles of form, anatomy, structure, and balance—released into artists’ hands and available for divergent world-making.*
*paraphrased from the curatorial text by Raffie Davtian originally written in Farsi
Figurative Education (2011-2015)
These are a selection of drawings and sculptures from 2011–2015 that emerged from my figurative studies with Raffie Davtian at Kargah Honar in Tehran, Iran. I carried this training across studies and exercises, which informed my material and spatial understanding of how the body occupies space. Seen together, these works trace an early period of learning that sedimented in my practice and continues to resonate in later work.
Aria Farajnezhad 