tree trunk, ropes, carabiner, charcoals on wooden wall, overhead, C-Print photographs, overhead photo | 270 x 270 x 30cm, 150 cm x 15cm Ø, 15 x 10cmand A4 overhead prints,
Installation view, Artist on Residency Show, Tankstation Cultureel
Vulpunt Enschede, Netherlands, 2019
December 2019 I made a site-specific installation during my artist residency
in Enschede, Netherlands.
The installation refers to the new green Square in front of the gallery.
The overhead reflects a photo of the planted trees on the showroom wall.
My tied tree trunk hangs weightlessly in the showcase in the room.
Artist´s Hand, 2021
50 x 50 cm, Collage and Mixed Media on board
The artwork Artist´s Hand is made by collage with layers of used cotton bedsheet and Fine Art c-print of two details of paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Slave Market, 1866 and The Artist and his Model, 1895.
Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 – 1904) was a French orientalist painter, who is considered as one of the most important painters of academic period of 1880. He combined accurate Middle Eastern Architectural details with idealized female nudes in his Paris studio. Slave Market depicts a fantasy scene imagined by the artist, of Arabic (Middle Eastern) men checking the teeth of a naked woman with a finger, for the purpose of deciding whether to buy her as a slave. 2019 the AfD party used Slave Market in a campaign poster. The Artist and his Model depicts Gérôme in his Studio. He is working on the sculpture of a naked woman using a nude model. The depiction is hyper realistic and the artist is working on the legs of the sculpture using his hands and a tool.
Artist´s Hand interrogates the colonialist point of view of orientalist art, and its use of the female body as a subject of free sexual fantasy. I use textile in my work as a medium for covering or exposing. White cotton of a used bedsheet is connected with the topics of colonial economy and labour and at the same time, lies in intimate proximity to the human skin and body. With the combination of the hand of the painter and the hand of slave merchant, I ask how the artist’s staging of the female nude presents a dialectical contrast between fantasy and documentation.
Untitled, 2020, Site-specific Installation, Pigment and Acrylic on bed sheets and wall, ca. 360 x 240 x 20 cm, exhibition view, 2 a duo pop-up exhibition in curated project center of the world is here, Przemyśl, Poland
Exhibition Text:
In January 2020, two artists from different cultural backgrounds met in Berlin to staging a joint exhibition. Magdalena Franczak and Azar Pajuhandé did not yet know that they would build their collaborative relationship from a distance. Shortly after they met a pandemic broke out and their dialogue ensued virtually. Over several months, the artists sent each other handwritten and scanned letters, drawings and voice messages. In this way, remotely, they established their connection with Przemyśl and with each other. In September, they will meet in a space they know only from photographs and video documentation. Will they manage to fill the emptiness? Does the emptiness need to be filled?
This project, focuses on the concept of control in city spaces and considers city trees. The tree has always been my fascination as a symbol. I get many inspirations from the symbolic aspect of tree in Iranian mytholo- gy and literature, which has been a major topic in my studies.
Tree Control, 2018, series of drawings, pen and oil on paper, 35 x 50 cm | installations view, Re-set, tetê Gallery, Berlin, 2018
