Golnar Adili: Found in Translation: A Story of Language, Play, and [...]. Curated by Kevin Beasley

GOLNAR ADILI

CUE Art Foundation 137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001

GOLNAR ADILI Found in Translation: A Story of Language, Play, and a Personal Archive

January 13—February 16, 2022 CUE Art Foundation Curator-Mentor KEVIN BEASLEY Essay by EMILY CHUN

My Mother’s Eyes Woven Into My Chest, 2018 Two transfer prints woven 17 x 20 inches

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Photograph of me and my mother at a friend’s birthday party shortly after my father’s escape from Iran in 1981. The writing appearing on the photo is transfered from a random letter from my father’s archive during Hurricane Sandy.

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GOLNAR ADILI Found In Translation

Art is my key to understanding the current underlying my identity and the world through a deconstruction and reconstruction of past traumas.

To break things apart and put them back together without losing any pieces is to make them resilient while showing their scars. In this ultimately healing process of revisiting and reshaping memory, I have infused my practice with play, inspired by how my child observes and archives the world. Making connections between similar shapes and events from different contexts is the foundation upon which we build our own vast internal library of the world. As a visual thinker interested in learning through comparison I am immensely inspired by my child’s learning process.

I was born in Virginia to activist parents fighting against the shah.

My family migrated to Iran in the wake of the revolution. Growing up in post1979 Tehran in the face of seismic geopolitical shifts, I experienced uprooting and disconnection. Iraq’s sudden attack on Iran shortly after

our arrival tightened the Islamic Republic’s grip on any political opposition, catalyzing my father’s eventual escape back to the US only two years after our resettlement in Iran. He was never able to return.

This separation split our family for many years, ending only when I moved to the US to attend college.

In my art I am compelled to decode the ways in which these events have marked me.

Forgetting and relearning both English and Persian multiple times has made language a fascinating reference in my work. Persian poetry, as well as biographical text investigating a landscape of longing, have provided a valuable context for examining language formally. These investigations include physically building words and letters with a multitude of materials such as wax, paper, wooden cubes, and concrete.

In doing so, I use architecture, book arts, and installation to distort and blur the lines between design, craft, and fine art. ◔ 05

GOLNAR ADILI is a mixed media artist, educator, and designer with a focus on diasporic identity. She holds a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and has attended residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation for the Arts (Bellagio, Italy), Center for Book Arts (NYC), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (MA), MacDowell Colony (NYC), Ucross Foundation for the Arts (Clearmont, WY), Lower East Side Printshop (NYC), Women’s Studio Workshop (Rosendale, NY), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace (NYC), among others.

Adili has shown her work internationally; venues include: the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), NURTUREart (Brooklyn, NY), Craft and Folk Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA), and International Print Center New York (NYC).

She has received several grants, including the PollockKrasner Foundation grant, NYFA Fellowship in Printmaking/ Drawing/Artists Books, and the Jerome Hill Finalist Grant.

Adili is a Jameel Prize finalist. Her artist books are in several collections, including the Library of Congress, Rutgers University, Yale University, and University of Michigan.

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To Ey Pari Kojayee, 2014 Beeswax, print on multiple layers of lens paper 19 x 16 inches

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They Quarrel (Bestizand), 2015 Silk Screen on two layers of lens paper 24 x 36 inches

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They Seat (Benshaanand)—Detail, 2015 Silk Screen on four layers of lens paper

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Baabaa Aab Daad (Father Gave Water), 2020 Wood, felt, board and cloth 5 x 7 x 1.5 inches (closed) Edition of 25

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Father Gave Water (Baabaa Aab Daad) is one of the first sentences Iranian children learn in first grade because of its elemental letter and sound composition. This phrase is associated with Seyyed Abbas Sayyahi who wrote and taught the First Grade Book and was the co-founder of the nomadic schools of Iran. The Education Department in Iran (Sazman é Aamoozesh va Parvaresh) adopted Syyahi’s book nationally, without any recognition of his contributions. Despite his incredible role in first grade education, Sayyahi never attended first grade himself, and started school at the age of ten in second grade. This book explores language through tactility and play, inspired by how my toddler navigates the world.

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Complete Verb Pairings From Samanbouyan, 2020 Wooden verbs scaled up in digital model Dimensions variable

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As They Sit They Settle (Benshinand-Benshaanand)—Side View, 2018 3D Resin Print 14 x 9 x 1.5 inches

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KEVIN BEASLEY Curator-Mentor

For Golnar Adili, play is a fulcrum for engaging the structure of language, text, and speech between poems and didactic constructions. Play is essential for the growth and wellbeing of the mind—the building blocks of cognitive development, mental acuity, and social confidence are at their greatest benefit in the young. But play is itinerant in regards to the scope of its role in an individual’s life. Work is not the opposite of play; the two are, in fact, best served in concert with one another. It also travels through both time and space—moving through experiences of separation, identity, and a sense of place. It is a language in and of itself that folds and flexes, exercised from the very beginning stages of life. The possibilities afforded by play open up a need for the transliteration of form, enabling an individual to tap into what is at stake in a space, or for an object.

In Adili’s work, the act of transliteration becomes a complex exploration of language, material processes, and form. How does one reconcile the relationship between a kufic script

and its architectural substrate? As a means for understanding and accessing the nuances of what is lost in translation, Adili employs the form of puzzles, structural blocks, and images to address what she calls the “poetics of deconstructing language through material and processes.” That which must be uncovered is only revealed through a transliteration.

How else does one account for the sound and feel of the atmosphere?

In our conversations together, it has been important that the biographical current within each image, script, or form maintains its autonomy as a lived experience, point of departure, and memory of her own body—all while being opened up, revealed, and transformed. The unfolding of a puzzle is not just a metaphor for the unfolding of a memory, but is in its own right the revealing of a shared language within ourselves.

The modularity of form possessed

by Adili’s objects captivate the imagination and perpetuate a curiosity about who we are, where have we come from, and where are we going. ◑ 15

KEVIN BEASLEY (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA) is a New York-based artist who transforms materials of cultural and personal significance into sculptures, site-specific installations, and sound-based performances. His work acknowledges the complex, shared histories of the broader American experience, steeped in generational memories.

A selection of recent exhibitions, installations, and performances include Prospect.5, New Orleans (2021); Performa 2021 Biennial, New York, NY; The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA (2021); Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York, NY (2021), A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa (2020); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2018-2019); and The Studio Museum in Harlem, Morningside Park, NY (2016).

Beasley’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Tate, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, MA; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; among others.

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Family of Kites—Childhood Letter to my Father, 2014 Digital print on Japanese paper, wax, foam core 8 x 10.5 x 2 inches each

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Left: A drawing of our family as kites, on the back of one of my first letters to my father.

Above: A photograph of me and my father on the last day I saw him in Iran, by a park photographer, 1981.

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A postcard sent from me to my father, marking the first anniversary of the revolution, depicting different scenes from the Iran-Iraq war. The sentence inside the card, written in my first grade handwriting, reads “dear daddy, I send this postcard for you.”

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She Feels Your Absence Deeply, 2021 3.25 x 4.25 x 1.75 inches Publisher: Women’s Studio Workshop Edition of 50 This book utilizes materials from an archive of letters, photos, and printed matter once owned by my father. The collection spans from 1979, when my family migrated back to Iran from the US, and continues through 1981, when my father escaped Iran for fear of persecution due to his activism. Inspired by children’s puzzle books, images are printed on six-sided cubes allowing the viewer to obscure, reveal, mix, and match the intimate artifacts from the collection. The blocks are housed inside a portfolio box that opens flat and carries the print of the airplane ticket used in the final leg of my father’s long journey from Iran.

When the box is closed the airplane hugs the blocks, keeping the events inside until they unravel again to tell a visual story of how a family was affected by larger political shifts.

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EMILY CHUN Translatory Gestures

“It is one of the strangest things, the fact that we are all going to die,” the late artist Christian Boltanski said in a 1990 interview. “We are all so complicated, and then we die…

Suddenly we become an object you can handle, like a stone. But a stone that was someone.”

This transition from subject to object upon death is doubled when the deceased person leaves behind an overflowing archive full of objects that live on—deathless—after their demise.

You are left with a surplus of objects: the objectness of the dead loved one as well as their personhood calcified into archival objects. Such was the case for Iranian-American artist Golnar Adili, whose father—a leftist writer and activist in the Iranian Revolution—left behind a massive, meticulous archive to the artist, his only child, upon his death. It took ten years for Adili to feel ready to comb through it.

It is fitting that the archive serves as a starting point for many of Adili’s works, given that her practice centers largely on the exploration and translation of materials. You can see the influence of Fluxus on her works; like Fluxus, her multidisciplinary practice privileges process over the end product and radiates playfulness, even when kneading through loaded concepts like diaspora, familial longing, and loss. Cast in a visual vocabulary of poems, letters, and the Persian alphabet, Adili’s solo exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation yokes together her investigation of the Persian language with her long-standing interest in geopolitical displacement.

She Feels Your Absence Deeply (2021) is composed of twelve miniature blocks that feature, among other things, images of her mother’s passport photo, an airplane ticket, 25

and a pink letter from her mother to her father. Printed on these blocks are archival images from the years 1979-1981, when Adili and her parents reverse-migrated to Iran. There, in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, her father had to go into hiding to avoid government persecution, eventually escaping to the United States by himself. This long separation led to countless letters back and forth that are included in her father’s archive and gave rise to the affective sensibility that informs Adili’s practice. This sensibility crystallizes a theme woven throughout her earlier works: the permanence of political upheaval in the way it inadvertently becomes the entire landscape upon which life transpires.

Due to flooding damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, some letters and photographs in her father’s archive became stuck to each other.

Adili chose to maintain these mergings, perhaps as a nod to their paradox: their inextricable, permanent nature was made possible only through the ephemerality of the archival materials.

The only way for fragile materials and memories to become more permanent is, in this case, to combine and overlay—a literalization of Barthes’s observation that photography’s relation to loss is expressed as a unique superimposition of the past onto present realities. This, maybe, protests against forgetting.

Inspired by her toddler’s toys, this work literally deconstructs and reconstructs these visualized memories through the haptic medium of building blocks.

But there’s a poetic charge in how the grievous concept of family separation is distilled into a form so innocuous, 26

elemental, and universal as children’s building blocks, which can be contained in the palm of one’s hand. It is as if to say that in the face of the unanswerable tragedies of life, inflected by larger geopolitical forces, we retain a childlike belief in the possibility of simply piecing the fragmented family back together again into one coherent whole.

Wooden blocks appear again in the work Father Gave Water (Baabaa Aab Daad) (2020). It consists of a felt board with indents that hold the blocks, spelling out the titular sentence in Persian.

“Baabaa Aab Daad,” associated with the children’s education specialist Seyyed Abbas Sayyahi, is the first sentence Iranian students learn in first grade due to its elemental linguistic and sound composition. The idea of the alphabet as the “building blocks” of language is literalized in the work as physical blocks that constitute each letter of the sentence. Adili chose this text as a

way to revisit the fundamentals of the language, as she learned and forgot both English and Persian multiple times when she moved back and forth between the two countries as a child. There’s also something to be said about the centrality of the father figure in this basic sentence, and by extension, in the building of the Persian language. When juxtaposed with the absence of Adili’s father throughout her childhood, as well as the broader phenomenon of thousands of children losing their fathers in the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War that followed it, the sentence “Father gave water” assumes greater poignancy and evokes melancholic longing. Indeed, the artist remembers a revolutionary song from this time period that was used to galvanize the masses by reconfiguring the sentence “Father gave water” to “Father Gave Water is no longer our slogan, Father gave blood, Father gave (up) life.”

As both content and form, language supplies a structuring narrative to Adili’s exhibition at CUE. If Father Gave Water (Baabaa Aab Daad) investigates a didactic usage of the Persian language, other works in the exhibition excavate the language’s poetic possibilities. The point of departure for these works is the classical poem Samanbouyan (loosely translated as “The Jasmine-Scented Ones”) by the 14th century mystic poet Hafez. A poem that has occupied Adili for a long time, each of its stanzas is a meditation on life organized around a central wordplay between two verbs that are similar in form, but at times contradictory or different in meaning.

In the first stanza of the poem, for example, As the jasmine-scented ones sit, they settle the dust of sorrow, the words “sit” and “settle” stem from the same root (“Benshinand” / “Benshaanand”). In a series of silkscreen works entitled Samanbouyan (2015),

An envelope from my father’s archive, sent between our address in Tehran and his in Northern Virginia. This envelope, like many other pieces in this archive, was salvaged from my studio after it flooded during Hurricane Sandy.

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Samanbouyan, 2008 Graphite on paper 24 x 36 inches

Adili gives visual form to the tension in such verb pairs. Each work in the series, printed using light grey ink on layers of translucent rayon Japanese lens sheets that look as diaphanous as tissue paper, bears a pattern made of the word for “sit,” benshinand. These layers alternate with other layers featuring a pattern made of its paired word, “settle,” benshaanand. The patterns are tensely locked in place on the sheets while threatening to evanesce at the same time, due to the ghostly look of the papers.

The ephemeral quality of these overlaid papers recalls the larger fragilities, longings, and hauntings that animate Adili’s practice. The iterative, meditative mark-making employed by Adili brings to mind the work of Dansaekhwa, a group of Korean painters in the 1970s who foregrounded mark-making as a way to cultivate a religious spirit. “Art is no longer an act of fulfillment,” the Dansaekhwa artist Park Seo-Bo remarked, “but an act of emptying.” But unlike the Dansaekhwa artists who sought to disavow pleasure in their process, Adili’s works are not bracketed off from the world, but instead revel in the playfulness inherent in iteration and repetition.

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In Benshinand-Benshaanad (As They Sit They Settle) (2015), Adili paired these two words together to create a vaselike shape (it looks like a “gentle slope,” she told me). The two repeated words slowly fuse into each other as they meet in the middle, like an X-chromosome, compressing and decompressing.

Persian poetry functions almost as a form of emotional inheritance for Adili; her father’s letters in his archive are peppered with quotes from poems.

As such, in Benshinand-Benshaanad, Adili conceives of Hafez’s poem as a literal vessel that symbolically holds and contains. The way her works hypostatize linguistic wordplay into spatialized forms and shapes speaks to her background in architecture (Adili worked as an architect for a few years before returning to art), as these works privilege the Persian language as typography—and topography—rather than calligraphy. By abstracting the words to look pixelated and modular, her works free the words from Western aesthetic expectations of calligraphy as a reified form of the Persian language and ask instead how the structure of language can accumulate in meaning.

For Complete Verb Pairings from Samanbouyan (2020), Adili created wood maquettes of all the verb pairings in Hafez’s poem. They are enlarged, three-dimensional models of the verb pairings, rendered in the same pixelated, geometric form as the ones in Benshinand-Benshaanad and Father Gave Water. It’s slightly disorienting to conceive of language in such spatial terms, and to see how letters of the alphabet might have a physical presence outside the bounds of twodimensionality. We are so used to seeing letters mostly on flat surfaces—paper, screens, billboards—that we forget they may have a life in three-dimensional space if we allow it.

As such, the work bypasses the longstanding conflict between word and image, or the question of whether the visual must be consummated by the textual, by asking: why not just make the letters the image? By coalescing

the visual and textual into one single object, Adili suggests an answer to the untranslatability of the visual— by offering a form of translation not just between the visual and textual but between mediums and forms.

The title of the exhibition, “Found in Translation,” refers to the surprising and generative possibilities of translation as autotelic, rather than marked by distorted meaning, misunderstanding, or foreclosed desire, which all often attend translation. “Translation,” Gayatri Spivak states in The Politics of Translation, “is the most intimate act of reading… The task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow.”

Instead of translating Persian poetry into English and thereby making Persian accessible to an English-speaking audience, Adili pursues other, perhaps more pressing, forms of translation: emotions into concrete forms, the twodimensional into three-dimensional, and the self into affective material. ●

Comparative Benshinand and Benshaanand wooden constructions, 2020 29

EMILY CHUN is a Korean-American art writer based in New York. She has written for various publications such as the Brooklyn Rail, ArtAsiaPacific, and Ocula, and has contributed to curatorial projects at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Tufts University Art Galleries. You can write to her at emilyechun@gmail.com or find her on Instagram at @emchun.

Mentor MANIJEH MORADIAN received her PhD in American Studies from NYU and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the former co-director of the Association of Iranian American Writers. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in Fall 2022. Her essays and articles have appeared in Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, Scholar & Feminist Online, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asian, Africa, and the Middle East, Social Text online, jadaliyya. com, tehranbureau.com, Bi Taarof, and Callaloo. She is a member of Jadaliyya’s Iran Page editorial board and a founding member of Raha Iranian Feminist Collective.

This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors appointed

by AICA to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.

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CUE connects practicing artists and arts workers to essential resources and community. We exhibit new work, provide mentorship to under-recognized and underrepresented artists, build platforms to exchange ideas, create the context to develop peer-to-peer relationships, and educate a diverse next generation of artists.

Exhibiting artists are selected through one of two methods: nomination by an established artist or selection via our annual Open Call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, curators and Open Call panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing their exhibition. We are honored to work with the artist Kevin Beasley as the Curator-Mentor to Golnar Adili.

STAFF

Corina Larkin Executive Director

Wendy Cohen Programs Associate

Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director

Sharmistha Ray Development Manager

Gillian Carver Programs & Comms. Coordinator

Cara Erdman Development Coordinator

CUE Art Foundation | cueartfoundation.org 137 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 31

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Amanda Adams-Louis Theodore S. Berger Kate Buchanan Marcy Cohen Blake Horn Thomas K.Y. Hsu Steffani Jemison

John S. Kiely Vivian Kuan Rachel Maniatis Aliza Nisenbaum Kyle Sheahen Lilly Wei Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus

ADVISORY COUNCIL

Polly Apfelbaum Katie Cercone Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Trenton Doyle Hancock

Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass Sharon Lockhart Juan Sánchez Andrea Zittel Irving Sandler (in memoriam)

CUE Art Foundation’s programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals including: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Aon PLC Chubb Compass Group Management LLC DataSite ING Financial Services Merrill Corporation The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation William Talbott Hillman Foundation New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature This program is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

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Cover: Dust of Sorrow (Ghobar e Gham), 2018 Photo lithography laser-cut text 18 x 30 inches All artwork © Golnar Adili Designed by Joshua Hauth

CUE Art Foundation 137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001