The Made, The Undone and The Make-Dos (Savaareh, Oftaadeh, Piyaadeh) ( فارسی )

Writen By Vali Mahlouji

Found objects are assembled to create the installation entitle The Made, The Undone and The Make-Dos (Savaareh, Oftaadeh, Piyaadeh). At the core of the installation stands a horse with two travellers.

The world of Bita Fayyazi is always a kind of performance, or better a ritual. Whether a live act, a frozen tableau, a sculpture in bronze, ceramic or an assemblage of found objects, the ‘artifact’, as it were, embodies a whole narrative of experience, always directly sourced from a personal sphere of life, usually a very individual world. The result is that Fayyazi’s work exists within its own set of rules, quite independent of trends and is, by nature, hardly subtle. Relating to her work is predicated on the desire to enter into it, and it is less about understanding, more about feeling.

Fayyazi weaves elaborate tales. In this instance, literally using yarn, rope, hair and a whole array of natural or synthetic fibres, she weaves over found objects, household or discarded goods, used, worn garments and undergarments and sculpts a makeshift horse and two riders. The yarn is spun around like a skin, holding and defining the forms. The forms reveal rudimentary volumes shaped as a horse and riders and they are obviously deliberately crude. A central (dominant) figure astride the horse holds onto – or is he shrugging off – another faceless figure of possibly female form, judging by the pronounced hips. The second figure is bent over the knees of the upright rider in a wounded (or submissive) disposition. This core configuration rests on a pedestal assembled from scantily placed scrap wooden planks. Yarn is allowed to flow freely off the core forms to spread across the floor and crawl up the walls, filling the space. The spilling yarn that encroaches on the space enhances a fluid nature and suggests spontaneous versatility – it could be shaped in different ways, adapted to the space and the public may be allowed to either walk around it or be in it. Like much more, negotiation is deliberately left unresolved. But the deluge also deliberately threatens the space and the audience and is like a menacing cancer, interminable.

The precariousness of the foundation and the arbitrariness of the materials lend the work an air of both grotesque and wonderful fragility. There is no shine, sheen or polish to the material and the figures have an unsettlingly spongy, droopy quality. The softness of the texture and colourful familiarity of the fibres does little to comfort. There is violence in the execution, in the unfinished, rugged scragginess of the texture and the rough-hewn style, as there is vulnerability in the depiction of the scene and the fragile dynamics of the relationships.

© Vali Mahlouji February 2012