Sarah Rahbar: Swarming

Memory and ideological symbols are remixed with a very direct, physical syntax, while deconstructing personal history and the 21st century human condition. The materials collected or found and body parts casted reverberate against the walls in protest. Careful titles lead us in poetic discourse with the objects in front of us, and loose us along the way. There is a direct dialogue between the work and us, reflecting on aspiration and tragedy, we are witness to the battlefields of mankind and human nature itself.

With geometric precision but organic arrangement, Sarah Rahbar (b. 1976, Tehran) combines wheels, batons, shoe forms, weapons, sickles, shovels, limbs, and other tools of once used trades, to create the workers eulogy. The sculptures act as sites of collection and remembrance. Once used and held by a human, the workers tools do not lose their humanity as the people who once used them lost their life, but stand as a representation for their sacrifice.

Bronze cast arms, legs, and heads contort, confessing doubt filled apprehensions. With their sometimes bound, awkward or painful gestures, the limbs ask questions we are often fearful to know the answer to or anxiously nudge the reluctant elephant in the room.

Like the man made tools of years past, minds, bodies, and selves, labor away until grooves are worn away, points are no longer sharp and pieces move no more. The endless competition for success and standards of living drives humanity’s lust for life to an early grave.

We are left with a demonstration of how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our individual desires and collective movement towards “progress”.