Fariba Ferdosi, an Iranian artist who lives between Florence and Tehran, presents at the Trans-Unto Museum in Florence: Persian Food, a work from 2002.
The Trans-Unto Museum, created in 1994 by Lorenzo Pizzanelli, an artist, author and multimedia director with whom Ferdosi collaborated on various artistic projects between 2002 and 2010, is a symbolic place created to induce a reflection on the concept of authorship and of institutional authority... as Pizzanelli himself writes in this regard.
Persian food is a digital print on canvas with oil paintings measuring 100x70 cm. The image presents on a plate placed on a carpet a woman's face duplicated horizontally in the shape of the nose and mouth but missing the forehead. A single eye is highlighted, with a writing in Parsi in place of the second. An anonymous hand in a white glove lifts the lid of the chafing dish, its arm, barely visible, showing an elegant embroidered cuff. The refinement of the details embellishes the work and the ethical allusions are largely intuitive.
Fariba Ferdosi works on identities starting from her own, Iranian and Italian. At the basis of his research is an interest in the aesthetics and ethics of the roots of "archetypes". Convinced of the social value of art, she favors interaction as written in her biography. The artist ranges from installation to interactive video art, from Net Art to performance, without neglecting other techniques such as photography, painting and sculpture. The latest work is Nido/Crona, Glass Art. The artist writes about it: The work takes up one of the most popular iconographic themes in Western (art) history, the crown of thorns of Christ. The ancestral image... the crown of mockery... becomes barbed wire, border, militarized frontier, trench. It is a thorny and treacherous Nest, which I can look at from the outside or inhabit from inside. But it is also a glass nest, which in addition to its fragile and vulnerable nature, reminds us that thorny boundaries are never absolute, but transform, migrate, break their meaning over time.
Another work gives us a sense of the artist's ethical-political vision. The title: Pecorato, at the same time installation, sculpture, digital art and performance. Fariba Ferdosi says: The idea on which the project revolves... is around the icons of Fundamentalism, the culture of the image in which it is represented, the aesthetics of obtuseness. As the starting icon I chose a Sheep with a Rifle. An oxymoron-image that combines the gentle and peaceful character of the animal with the aggressive and violent archetype of the rifle. The sheep – in Islam – is considered a sacred animal. Even today it is part of the tradition to sacrifice this animal for important moments in life: weddings, travel, work, buying a house... however, I have been able to verify that in all cultures it is also considered a symbol of dullness.
Elda Torres