Ramin Takloo-Bighash's Studio

A collboration with artist Catherine Lyu for the project Home, Not Home with Anysuqared and Pilsen Arts & Community House.

Curatorial statement by the show’s curator Dr. Lucy Mensah of Museum and Exhibition Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago:

Curated in the spirit of collaboration and investigation, a series of encounters and CTRL+histories are joint MFA thesis shows that emerged from a single question raised by MUSE’s (Museum and Exhibition Studies) Exhibition Practices class and answered by this year’s graduating students of UIC’s MFA program: How does art invite us to explore the encounter between embodied memory and larger historical, social, and institutional ones?

In a series of encounters, artists Derek A. Holland, Ramin Takloo-Bighash, Aishath Huda, Erin Palovick, and Teresita Carson explore the concept of “presence” in their respective work, and quite expansively; the presence of human bodies, social bodies, organic matter, and materialized histories. Holland and Takloo-Bighash call attention to how trauma—whether individualized or collective—throws representational modes of artistic expression into crisis, necessitating more experimental, abstracted techniques of rendering the body as an archival site of systemic, state-sanctioned violence. Huda and Palovick poetically navigate the transitory, fleeting nature of their respective mediums, water for the former and time for the latter. Both artists meditate on the productive challenges of documenting the two inherently fluid, dynamic, and performative mediums. Lastly, Carson’s immersive, transmedial installation reckons with the shepeshifting, site-dependent nature of mythology and historical memory.

In CTRL+histories, artists Emmanuel Ramos-Barajas, Eleanor Schichtel, Ashley Dequilla, Rabia Tayyabi, and Inseok Choi stretch the capacities of technology to alter societal perspectives on topics such as cartography, the nature/culture dialectic, gender-based violence, mental health, and popular culture. Ramos-Barajas and Schichtel are mutually invested in the ethics of historiography and turn to computer software as a means of intervening in dominant historical narrative and exposing “History” as a composite of constructed, institutionalized narratives open for revision. Dequilla’s and Tayyabi’s media-based art riff on the radical refrain, “the personal is political,” in the exploration of “the screen as an extension of the racialized, gendered, and minoritized body. Finally, Chois artistic practice examines the personal even further by adapting early photography techniques, which expose (and re-expose) the fragile, impermanent conditions of modern, urban-sited subjectivity.

As I write these lines I have an earache and I'm dealing with a bout of vertigo, the cause of which might be a bike accident three years ago. I am now aware of my ears, of the ringing in my head, of my eyes that can't focus, of my fingers that have trouble searching for the correct keys on the keyboard, and as I pause to let my eyes regain focus I'm aware of my body, the parts of it, the individual parts---and my awareness of my body is imbued with suspicion, the sort of suspicion that goes beyond what's problematic and failing, but also those parts of my body that are aging, at the verge of failure. It's as if I'm waiting for for my body parts to malfunction, to break, to fail, a Heideggerian ready-to-hand phenomenon except that here my awareness stems from an anxiety fueled by age and a sense of dread--dread of judgement, dread of turning into a has-been, a once-was, a dead person. Or, maybe, I'm the only person who's judging me, who's gazing at me, my gaze turned inward, as I evaluate me, examine my body and my presence, and my existence. Maybe this is not the death-wish-turned-inward, but my judgement, my self-examination, my evaluation of my place in relation to me, to my body, and to the bodies around me, to where I stand in relation to other people, and maybe it is through this process of examination that I'm finally becoming aware of my loneliness, or of our loneliness, individually and collectively. Loneliness, as piece-by-piece, we break down, and eventually die. Maybe we try again, maybe we reproduce hoping to do better next time, maybe we watch other people reproduce, and we gaze at them, wishing to be them, maybe we evaluate them, we envy them, we judge them, we want them, we devour them--maybe we break down and start over---and maybe next time we do better, maybe we don't. Or maybe we are doomed to repeat things as we did them last time, maybe our efforts are doomed to banality---maybe there is no real story, or if there is a story, it is boring.

Maybe there is a way out, and in order to reach it you just need to start walking. Maybe all you need to do is stand up, close your eyes, ignore all the noise, and walk. If you run into a wall, keep walking; if you fall in water, swim; if you reach the end of the world, fly--maybe learning to fly is our only shot at salvation. Maybe there is no salvation, and our bodies are our perpetual prisons. Maybe we will never know. Maybe we are doomed to not knowing. Maybe we will never know. Maybe we are doomed to not. Maybe we will never. Maybe we are doomed. Maybe we will. Maybe we are.

Material: Plaster bandages, pedestal, and Derek Holland’s footprints.

A film in three parts.

Take 1: Wondering among the headless sculptures of the Agora (Magdalena Abakanowicz, 2006), listening to Peter Pringle sing Gilgamesh in Sumerian.

Take 2: Arad (13) watches Take 1 and talks about the Gilgamesh and mortality.

Take 3. Shalizeh (15) watches Take 2 and contemplates death.

This past summer my brother and I were walking down the street somewhere in Southern Iran, by the Persian Gulf, in the middle of Tasoo’aa, a religious festival when some guy walked up to us and asked, “Are you so and so’s son?” He was talking about my father. When my brother confirmed, the man said “Yes, you look like him when he was a young man.” The man didn’t look very old, so I wondered how he might have known anything about my father in his youth. In the frenzy of the festival, I lost the man, but spent the next two days looking for him with my camera, hoping to interview him. I never found him, which was strange, given the size of the town. I have since thought a lot about whether the man was real. Did I imagine the exchange? What are the chances of this conversation not ever having taken place? Obviously, I could ask my brother, but do I want to? Do I need to? What if he tells me the conversation did take place? What if he tells me that it didn’t? In any case I have decided that I don’t need to know. Some of what's in this film was recorded while searching for the man. Some of it while watching my mom age quietly, alone in her home. Some of it while watching my sister and nieces at work. Some of it while visiting rescue animals. Some of it while walking around in Tehran, or Karaj, or Sarbandar in scorching heat. Some of it while hallucinating and daydreaming about things that could have been and aren't, and things that are that could not have been. Some of it sane, some of it drenched in insanity.

Acknowledgements: This film was made with help from Jennifer Reeder. I thank the members of the UIC graduate committee (Sabrina Raaf, Ava Wanbli, and Nathaniel Young) during fall 2022 and my advisor Beate Geissler for feedback and advice. I also thank the family members and friends who agreed to be filmed for this project during my trip to Iran in August 2022.

Various experiments in film.

As opposed to Derrida’s notion of an archive, memory, itself often imagined as a sort of archive of happenings and experiences, is a nebulous, amorphous entity without clear boundaries. Derrida postulates that there is no archive without an outside. Archive operates on rigid rules, memory, on loose associations. Archive is the objects, memory is the network, but Archive is definitive in its exclusiveness, whereas Memory is never definitive. It is never exclusive, it doesn’t define an outside, it doesn’t prescribe an inside. Archive points towards the future. It determines the future of what it hosts, and as such, it is presumed to be perpetual, to be permanent. In contrast, memory points to the past. Memory is not permanent. Archive is “the law of what can be said”, memory is what’s not. Archive is how we conquer the world; memory is how we understand ourselves and our relationship with the world we live in. Archive is the grains of sand in the landscape; memory, the sunlight illuminating those grains right after sunrise. Archive is having legs; memory is having the will to run. Archive, the matter, memory, the soul.

In this work I explore the disintegration of language in the face of trauma.

An interview with my son Arad about his two ferrets Coco and Juno.

(This was my first film!)

She texted “Where did you get the names of all these people?”

I told her the website where I had found the names. A few minutes later she wrote “Number 3960 was my uncle.”

"What immigrants bring" is a project that explores immigration from the perspective of nostalgia, and how everyday objects, by virtue of their history, transcend their utilitarian relevance. Every family has heirlooms but what immigrants bring with them from their homeland and keep through the years, and sometimes generations, is more than just heirlooms---these objects are bridges to a past, to a former self that forms the basis on which immigrants build their present identities, a concrete object to hold on to and feel connected to their homeland, to their families whom they may not have seen for years, to their childhoods, to their homes.

A couple of years ago my younger sister sent me a treasure trove of old photos, mostly of my father as a young man, but also some of me as a baby, of my older brother as a toddler, and of my mother as a newlywed and as a young mother. Those photos form the background of this project, in which I try to represent my complex relationship with my heritage, my family, and especially with my father.

In this work I explore the effects of the COVID19 pandemic on the mental health of children.

In this work I celebrate the front line workers that kept our lives possible in the height of the COVID19 pandemic. All photos were taken at various locations in Evanston, IL, using whatever ambient light that existed, and were very minimally edited.

It is not clear to me why those who are in power in ideological dictatorships have such bad taste in fashion. The purpose of this series of photos is to put forth some clothing proposals for a more aesthetically pleasing dress code.

This work was inspired by the memories of my childhood in a fishing town on the Persian Gulf and by my love of movies. The center piece“The Entertainment Center”, was built from rope, found wood, and images of my favorite Iranian movies transferred onto the wood, set in a site specific presentation of Persian calligraphy.

This work was presented as an installation at Agitator Gallery in Chicago on October 26, 2019. The show was curated by Larry Kamphausen.

Persian calligraphy, and its incarnations in photo and painting, forms the core of my artistic practice. Calligraphy is not just about the representation of text. The significance of calligraphy as a practice lies in its dynamic nature, both in the hand movements that create the form, and in the process that transforms ink, or paint, from the liquid state to a stationary stain. And something of that movement, both external and internal, gets preserved in the resulting piece. Even though modern calligraphy has moved away from representing text as a coherent entity, our eyes still search for familiar shapes, it is as if we have entered a maze that needs to be explored, using the first discovered shape to look for other words, searching for connections, contemplating meanings. It is in this sense that calligraphy borders on cartography.