Nazgol Ansarinia

IRAN, 1979

How Things Work: The Practice of Nazgol Ansarinia

Nazgol Ansarinia’s work of the past seven years examines the systems and networks that underpin her daily life. Born and raised in Tehran, she trained in design in London before completing an MFA in the U.S. and returning to her native Iran. These multiple trajectories, of geography and approach, inform her methods and the subjects of her explorations.

Ansarinia often seeks to reveal the “inner workings of a social system” by taking its components apart and putting them back together, to uncover assumptions, connections and underlying rules of engagement. Her practice is characterized by an emphasis on research and analysis that can be traced back to her background in design and engagement with critical theory. Her mode of working covers diverse media—video, three-dimensional objects, found street signs and drawings—and subjects as varied as automated telephone systems, American security policy, memories associated with a family house and the patterns of Persian carpets. Three series of works from the last three years—Untitled (Do not give your opinion), 2006; NSS book series (2008); and Patterns series (2007–9)—highlight the uncovering of systems that is at the core of her practice.

In Untitled (Do not give your opinion), 2006, she brings the language and aesthetics of public signs commissioned by government departments and dispensing moral advice to the city’s inhabitants into the gallery space. This dislocation draws attention to

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how these banal signs—brightly colored text in Farsi: be patient, do not lose hope, be afraid, do not boast, obey—function as aesthetic and moral wallpaper.

This mode of interrogating governmentproduced text is also reflected in the NSS book series (2008), in which the artist rearranges the contents of a U.S. security policy document into an alphabetized lexicon to break syntactical relationships and allow new meanings to emerge by drawing attention to the document’s limited vocabulary with repetitions and emphases laid bare. She presents the work as a series of four books, with the cover of each book bearing a different arrangement of the visual elements of the U.S. presidential seal: a visual parallel to the treatment of the text within.

In her ongoing Patterns series (2007–9), Ansarinia embeds digitally drawn images of banal existence (a family on a scooter, an office worker drinking tea at his desk, wedding cakes) into the detailed and beautifully rendered patterns referencing Persian carpets. The works’ seductive qualities shield the multilayered examination of life toward which they hint. By using the patterns and motifs of “traditional” Persian carpets with embedded imagery of contemporary Tehran, they serve both to update the Persian carpet and to draw a map of Tehran’s social interactions.

Hammad Nasar