Recipient Information
Location
Nashville, Tennessee
Medium
Multidisciplinary
Year of Award
2021
Grant or Fellowship
Southern Prize and State Fellowship
Grant Amount
$5,000
Artist Biography
Raheleh is a collector of soil and sound, an itinerant artist, feminist curator, and community service advocate. Her work synthesizes socio-political statements as a point of departure and further challenges these fundamental arguments by incorporating ancient and contemporary media such as ceramics, poetry, ambient sound, and video. Her interdisciplinary practices act as an interplay between the literal and figurative contexts of land, ownership, immigration, and border.
Her work has been shown individually and collaboratively both in Iran and the United States, including the recent interactive multimedia solo exhibitions Inh(a/i)bited, an interactive multimedia installation in Spinello Project Gallery in Miami (2020), and The Overview Effect, an interactive Multimedia Installation in Betty Foy Sanders Gallery at Georgia Southern University (2019). Filsoofi’s ‘Imagined Boundaries’, a multimedia digital installation on border issues, consisting of two separate exhibitions, debuted concurrently in a solo exhibition at the Abad Art Gallery in Tehran and group exhibition (‘Dual Frequency’) at The Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida in 2017. The installations in each country connected audiences in the U.S. and Iran for few hours on the nights of the show openings. Her multifaceted curatorial project ‘Fold: Art, Metaphor and Practice’, which engaged over 20 artists, scholars, and educators in exhibitions, performances, and lectures over a period of one year in Edinburg and McAllen, Texas, has been a milestone in her professional career.
She has been the recipient of grants and awards, including the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. She is an Assistant Professor of Ceramics in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University. She holds an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Florida Atlantic University and a B.F.A. in Ceramics from Al-Zahra University in Tehran, Iran.
Artist Statement
Through years of multi-disciplinary practice, I’ve managed to keep pace with the rapidly changing socio-political debates around the world and their relative expansive influences on human conditions. Immigration, borders, and cultural communications are today’s most fundamental discourses, which are immensely interwoven with notions of identity, belonging, and inhabitation. Therefore, art could be an intermediary language shared between individuals, nations, and cultures, addressing these issues by touching the innermost layers of personality.
I’ve utilized different aesthetic strategies by experimenting with materials with wide ranges of relevant applications to my subject matters such as ceramics, poetry, and ambient sound and video, with a focus on representations of the ways I have negotiated and accessed concepts of heritage, place of origin, orientation and cultural adaptability. My multimedia installations rooted deeply in my cultural background and acquired a new identity as an immigrant; aiming to challenge the viewer’s standard point of view and personal perspectives. These interactive pieces invite the onlooker to delve into my recollections of sense, sound, and place and mementos of my journeys across the national and international borders.
The Inh(a/i)bited Space
Year: 2018
Medium: Multimedia Installation, Ceramic Vessels, Wire and
Size (h x w x d): 4 x 14 x 8 feet
The Inh(a/i)bited Space invites the viewer to delve into the artist’s personal recollections of senses, sound, and space. Her handmade vessels of memory, which present site-specific sound-bites, confront the paradox of inhibited and inhabited space in the wake of current socio-political immigration policies. The vessels with wires leading from one to the other, like the rhizomatous structure, collectively perform a symphony of melodic and ambient sound. The installation disrupts the viewer’s sense of utopia with the rhetoric of the travel ban and its progeny: disorientation, anxiety, and psychological displacement.
The Inh(a/i)bited Space - Details
Year: 2018
Medium: Multimedia Installation, Ceramic Vessels, Wire and
Size (h x w x d): 4 x 14 x 8 feet
The Inh(a/i)bited Space invites the viewer to delve into the artist’s personal recollections of senses, sound, and space. Her handmade vessels of memory, which present site-specific sound-bites, confront the paradox of inhibited and inhabited space in the wake of current socio-political immigration policies. The vessels with wires leading from one to the other, like the rhizomatous structure, collectively perform a symphony of melodic and ambient sound. The installation disrupts the viewer’s sense of utopia with the rhetoric of the travel ban and its progeny: disorientation, anxiety, and psychological displacement.
A Symmetrical Despondency
Year: 2018
Medium: Multimedia Installation, Ceramic Vessels and Video
Size (h x w x d): 8 x 10 feet x 12 inches
In this installation, lips tell muted stories, and closed jars muffle the sounds in a symmetrical environment. In the wake of the concurrent immigration issues in the United States and the Middle East, the artist portrays the labors of individual women passing through turmoil: two languages, two countries, two cultures, but the same circumstances for women. The artist recites a poem in her “home” languages, her home of origin, and her adopted home. However, the words can only be heard if the jars’ lids are removed. Does language change the context or the essence of a message? Do words matter if they are not heard, not understood? Can words overcome imposed geographical barriers which alienate nations so the voices that speak humanity are heard?
A Symmetrical Despondency-detail
Year: 2018
Medium: Multimedia Installation, Ceramic Vessels and Video
Size (h x w x d): 8 x 12 feet x 12 inches
In this installation, lips tell muted stories, and closed jars muffle the sounds in a symmetrical environment. In the wake of the concurrent immigration issues in the United States and the Middle East, the artist portrays the labors of individual women passing through turmoil: two languages, two countries, two cultures, but the same circumstances for women. The artist recites a poem in her “home” languages, her home of origin, and her adopted home. However, the words can only be heard if the jars’ lids are removed. Does language change the context or the essence of a message? Do words matter if they are not heard, not understood? Can words overcome imposed geographical barriers which alienate nations so the voices that speak humanity are heard?
Halal-1
Year: 2019
Medium: Ceramic and LED Light
Size (h x w x d): 8 x 24 x 24 inches
Racism shapes the very words our politics speak today, and it underlies a broader history of exclusion in the U.S that many Americans overlook. That history also shapes Trump’s tweets and some responses to them, and it raises the question of who gives permission, the right for one to stay or leave.
I am using soil from Chautauqua to create a plate. I dug the clay with my own hands, and I prepared and fired it to serve a meal. There is nothing more genuine, more indigenous than this. But now I feel compelled to ask: “Is this Halal (according to Sharia)? Is this permitted?” Who am I to touch this earth? Who am I to shape it in my own way? Do I even have a right to stand on the ground from which this came? Why am I even asking these questions? Who gets to decide this, anyway? This work is a response to the “Go Back to Your Country”.
Halal- 1 Detail
Year: 2018
Medium: Ceramics and LED light
Size (h x w x d): 8 x 24 x 24 inches
*Although the word “halal” is usually only equated with food in the West, the actual translation is “lawful” or “permissible” as defined by Shari’ah law and carries a deeper cultural and ideological meaning.
Imagined Boundaries – Episode 2 (Alert; Miscommunication)
Year: 2019
Medium: 9 Channel Video Installation
Size (h x w x d): 4 x 21 feet x 10 inches
Year: 2019
Medium: 9 Channel Video Installation
Size (h x w x d): 4 x 21 feet x 10 inches
The focus of this project, as the initial version of it (Imagined Boundaries), is to look beyond the current political rhetoric and posturing that puts the United States and Iran at loggerheads, in order to see the simple fact that we are all people living in a single world in this moment. Each side sees the other indirect, though silent, communication. What are we thinking when we are being recorded by the camera? What were those that we see thinking when they were recorded? Was it the same? Was it somehow different? The project, in its essence, is a call to communication in the face of current political confrontation.
Imagined Boundaries - Episode 2 (Alert; Miscommunication)
Year: 2019
Medium: 9 Channel Video Installation
Size (h x w x d): 4 x 21 feet x 10 inches
The focus of this project, as the initial version of it (Imagined Boundaries), is to look beyond the current political rhetoric and posturing that puts the United States and Iran at loggerheads, in order to see the simple fact that we are all people living in a single world in this moment. Each side sees the other indirect, though silent, communication. What are we thinking when we are being recorded by the camera? What were those that we see thinking when they were recorded? Was it the same? Was it somehow different? The project, in its essence, is a call to communication in the face of current political confrontation.