The scene unfolds at the surface. It reveals an earthy, brown or greyish colour where entangled bodies are dropped—or placed, colliding, coiled together, in pieces, dismantled. Whether standing, sitting or lying, these Butchered Bodies certainly stand out. And yet they also blend into the greyish-brown setting which serves as their backdrop. Like an emanation or emission, filamentous strokes wind their way over these bodies with splashes of red and vermilion coils forming, if we really follow the strokes, blood-soaked silhouettes. Are these traces of non-existent or eviscerated figures? Are they bordering the formless, defined thus by Georges Bataille, “The formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit”? Anything is possible. Vertical or horizontal, the bodies appear ready to go into battle in these uncertain times which make the past as present as the present appears infinite. Against whom? I don’t know. And the more apt question would be with whom? Who is the opponent close enough to touch or whom we must struggle against, fleeing that which threatens, rapes, mutilates, tortures and constrains, even if that means a well-placed snip of the scissors ?
Created in the workshop at the Lens/Pinault Collection artist residency where they’re staying with their partner Soufia, and where the artists’ paintings communicate, side by side, sometimes losing themselves in each other, Tirdad’s pieces emerge from an active practice where the body appears fully engaged. In the words of Baudelaire, “A good painting (...) must be made like a world”(1). It’s not Delacroix and his Death of Sardanapalus, a bloody depiction of a wholly imaginary East. It’s not Willem de Kooning’s massacre with—or against—the grotesquely exaggerated Women (numbered: I, II, III, IV, V…) with huge eyes, a menacing smile and deformed limbs; each of these “women” essentialised for the cis man who looks at them and paints them with terror. And yet all of these traditions have violently impacted the work of Tirdad Hashemi, who turns them inside out and into their battleground, wreaking havoc on History Painting. The work features bodies clearly identified as non-binary or trans, bearing mastectomy scars as decorative elements. They are modern-day bodies, disconnected from those typically presented by figurative binary conventions. Regardless of gender, they raise the question not only of what a body is but also of their relationship, their generation, their vulnerability—their rejection, their expulsion and their disappearance, which are currently taking place(2). They are joined by a sculpture here, and a series of drawings commemorating trans people who died.
Élisabeth Lebovici
1 Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1859
2 See the words banned by the Trump administration from US government websites.
Since meeting, Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian have worked on both their personal projects and a joint series of pieces, co-signed by both artists. As an exercise, experience, extension or graphic parallel to their lives, these drawings depict their way of life and broader relationship with queer or banished communities where confidences are shared in the face of an external, geopolitical, economic and climatic reality, and an ever-present past, which form their hidden frame. Crafted like a conversation on the sheet, the drawings de-frame reality in a room of one’s own or, rather, a room of their own.
Élisabeth Lebovici
