Nazgol Ansarinia: Paper Trail

Galleria Raffaella Cortese presents the first solo show in Italy by Iranian artist Nazgol Ansarinia.

Ansarinia examines daily life in her town, Tehran: she analyses and recasts everyday objects and events to draw out their relationships with the contemporary Iranian society, investigating the private sphere and its connection to the wider socio-economic and architectural context.
The exhibition revolves around three ongoing projects by the artist that well represent her practice and recent developments.

Central to her production are the collages from the Reflections/Refractions series, which visually explore the complexities of everyday life. Geometric designs, often used to evoke beauty in their order and symmetry, are applied to mirror works to distort the reality of anything they reflect.

For her latest project Membrane, on the other hand, the artist takes her own town as a starting point. In recent years Tehran is actually witnessing an intense process of urban transformation, characterized by the replacement of low-rise flats with taller apartment complexes. Although some buildings are destroyed, a layer of the demolished house remains on the shared wall of the adjacent constructions. Membrane is the monumental impression of this wall, mapped by the artist through a 3D scanner to recreate it as a three-dimensional model, which keeps a trace of the destroyed building.

A new sculpture from the Pillars series will also be on show. The artist looks at the new houses in her town, where neo-classical columns lost their structural function and became the latest display of wealth by the new middle class. Ansarinia ironically uses these columns, by connecting them to some articles from the Iranian Constitution that reflect on the socio-economic issues of everyday life. Nazgol Ansarinia’s exhibition is, at the same time, a document and a re-elaboration of Iran’s layered and fast-changing society.