Shirana Shahbazi

Shirana Shahbazi's new series of photographic works is conceived as an installation. The ensemble functions as a mural and consists of three photo-lithographs and a wallpaper produced by master printer Thomi Wolfensberger. Two lithographs were created as a diptych and the third one as a single piece. Shahbazi plays with the subject of a still life – a vase with five gerberas. The colors chosen for the works are subtle. The background and the base of the photos are respectively a light and dark gray, whereas the vase blazes in blue and the flowers in white and red. The artist incorporated a red stripe over the picture edge on two of the prints. Three layers reveal themselves to the viewer here: first, the photograph, exposed on the printing plate and classically created by adding each color progressively; second, the division of the subject and the playful handling of the layers and distances to the edge of the picture; third, the integration of the lithographs into the specially printed wallpaper as an installative wall piece that precisely bursts the image boundaries. The photo was taken in the artist's Berlin apartment, the bouquet standing on a table. One might think it is a snapshot of an object in an abstract geometric space, only the reflection of the vase suggests an interior.

Shirana Shahbazi's works show unique perspectives, layers and colors. They are staged and constructed, but never manipulated. The artist is rarely if ever concerned with issues of representation or reproduction of reality – be it a space, a person or an object. Shirana Shahbazi is primarily concerned with spatial sequences and the choreography of pictorial environments as part of our world. Accordingly, it is not about the interpretation of a subject, but about the material, visible and tangible as a visual translation. Shahbazi always creates her own new visual reality with her works. It is primarily not important what we see, but that we see and how we see. She unites art and everyday life with new visual perspectives. Contemporary and new forms of perception matter, similar to the photography of the Russian avant-garde. Arrangements, abstraction, fascination and irritation of the gaze are approaches that play a constant role in Shahbazi's oeuvre. Her works are not limited to the two-dimensional medium of photography, the artist rather emancipates her photography by going beyond its frame and conceiving the works spatially as murals and installations. DK

With big steps a girl marches through the picture, straight into the back left corner. The walls are in shadow, there is a bright field of light on the floor. The child's body does not cast a long shadow, the sun is at its zenith. Where does this High Noon scene take place? Is it a courtyard in Zurich, the Castel del Monte in Puglia? Is it a stage or everyday life? "All the world's a stage" and therefore both. The original is a photograph taken by Shirana Shahbazi on a trip to Iran.
What is stopping us from saving and forgetting this leaf in mint green and coral red as a travel memory? The protagonist shows us her back, runs purposefully and confidently out of the picture and gives us hope that she can always go her way purposefully, whether in Zurich, Apulia or Tehran.

We travel together with Shirana Shahbazi. The motifs of the present prints (wedding dresses, place under a bridge, an armchair) were taken up by the artist in Iran, Croatia and Turkey. They are not reminiscent of "typical" travel pictures showing sights and highlights for tourists, but they are wonderfully strange, cleverly selected (un)places or objects - chance acquaintances with a sometimes unfathomable, enticing charm. The black and white motifs are overprinted with a glazed red, which at first glance suggests something eerie, even violent. The oscillation between ordinary and threatening creates a fascinating tension. Shirana Shahbazi lays a visual trail that can lead to surprising as well as familiar places.

The photographer Shirana Shahbazi is known for her still lifes, landscapes and her geometrically abstract constructions. For the VFO, the artist has now for the first time overprinted three motifs in color in the lithographic workshop - this combination of still lifes and abstract color surfaces represents a premiere in her oeuvre. Urs Stahel writes the following about construction and abstraction in Shahbazi's work: "From the preoccupation with still lifes, with the question of what still lifes are arranged on, a free construction of colour surfaces emerges, which play a fascinating, even irritating game between surface and depth. Freely but precisely arranged colour forms, constructed in the studio by assembling geometric colour bodies, are placed next to pictures of rocks, mountains and landscapes. Structural similarities between outside and inside, between seen landscape and constructed landscape are put in relation to each other. Natural forms stand next to geometric forms, images constructed by mere seeing next to stage-like installations." (Catalogue for the solo exhibition "Much like Zero", 2011, Fotomuseum Winterthur).