Embodiment of the Intertwined, graduating exhibition by Raha Fard
"As an Iranian female artist, living in self-imposed exile, and as a cancer survivor, I interrogate my body and my soul, about what I have experienced in my social-political time and place. The exhibition is a visualization of the trauma experienced in my Iranian body in the disassociated space of a diasporic context within Canada. My work visually explores reconstructing Iranian cultural elements, like the Persian rug, through/with my body.
The indexical imprints of my body recollect my memories of my homeland and the trauma that resonates through the afflictions of the chronic pain I had experienced. This creates an unsettled ambivalence between the trauma state in my homeland and the longing for my cultural comforts of lost family kinships while existing between two spaces of Iran as a memory and Toronto-Tkaronto, Canada as a physical space. My mind is in one space, my body is in another, while my soul lingers in between. The Persian rug acts like a memory with impressions of my body both visible and invisible, at the same time it creates a transitional state between culture and the personal."