Navid Azimi Sajadi | Baris Saribas | Yousef Moscatello

The Nest Has Beed Destroyed

A rare and extraordinary exhibition, The Nest Has Been Distroyed, focusing on the works of three prominent Middle eastern artists, will be on view at AZAD ART GALLERY in Teheran from April, 8th 2011 through April, 20th 2011. 

The show will highlight the works of: Navid Azimi Sajadi from Iran, actually an emigrate in Rome. Italian origin Yousef Moscatello, now converted to Islam and leaving in the UAE. And finally the Turkish Baris Saribas.
Losses that life implies, from childhood to adult life and its unavoidable changements, as part of the growing process, will be on show. Not only from the artists’ personal point of view, who have left their country of origin or the place of birth to live like strangers in a new reality with all the difficulties that this choice can imply. But also losses in their artworks which deal with either the history of their countries’ splendid past, somehow nowdays completely faded or only a document on politics “fight” which refuse to focus on the beauty of life.

Iran, in fact, used to be an amazing melting, golden pot for culture and rich history. A kaleidoscopic scene, the epicenter of One Thousands and One Nights, the land of Gilgamesh, the strangler of lions, and Ishtar, the goddess of nature who gives life and takes it away; the Sassanid Kingdom was an inexhaustible source of all those ancestral stories exuding kings, dames, knights with their treasures of gold, myrrh, incense, religion, fanaticism and censorship. Where have those fantastic dream-like stories that enchanted the whole world, gone?
To answer this question we analyse Navid Azimi Sadjadi’ work. It entwines around those plots, whose metaphorical components, form their own respective relationships, transform and reconstruct their original meanings. Those elements live as a fluid suspended between time and space.
One of the title of Navid Azimi Sadjadi's work on paper is enigmatic: Al Ghaib, in arabic “the absence”. The black ink depicts a cage composed of talismans in an esoteric style and enriched with occidental symbols. The subject of this drawing is a mysterious bird in an elegant frame, a well-known symbol of the Persian civilization: birds were drawn on the vases of the ancient Persepolis to represent the soul. Sajadi's drawing may also be interpreted as a human being. In Arabic culture birds shelter the souls of the dead. But in Sadjadi's drawing the soul disappears, swallowed by the cage of talismans. The selected colors, black and white, represent the elements of the Absolute - like life and death - the artist said.
In his second work, Hg SO4, the focus is on the fading of clear sexual personalities. Sajadi has photographed a group of male transvestites and transsexuals. That is how he represents the changes that have affected sexual identity, as well as the masks that everybody wears and the bluffs he has fallen into, often unwittingly, in everyday lives. The title of this work is the chemical formula of the mercuric sulfate, an alchemical androgen . The artist evokes the existence, in nature, of the hybrid elements that connect opposites. This perspective allows him to justify physical and spiritual changes in transsexuals, as if they were primordial divinities. They join femininity and masculinity inside themselves. They enjoy a wholeness that is not given to everybody. From this point of view, which leans on an allegorical image of the original omnipotence, hermaphroditism is the failure of gender distinction. This complementarity of elements is the heart of Navid Sadjadi's artistic vision, focused on the loss of judgment, open to dialogue and acceptance of diversity. With his magic gestures, he gathers – at a subliminal and shamanic level - the masculinity and the femininity present in each one of us in order to re-establish the dialogue necessary to both sexes for accepting and loving themselves.
In his third series of work, the photo Nuclear stardom is a coloured, almost joyful explosion. “Merry” atomic mushrooms, which Iran, his native country, is so famous for. Just as Barak Obama has started to talk about international nuclear disarmament, his artworks are like alarm bells. They are blessings of consciousness coming from one who comes from that reality. Transferring images of Sassanid origin into western deformations, Navid Azimi Sajadi reorganizes concepts. And he surprises everything and all. This is his broken nest.

Italy as well in the XV, XVI century especially, used to generate great brains, great architecture, wonderful intellectual and artists from Michelangelo to Bernini, from Dante, Petrarca and Macchiavelli, to Tiziano and Veronese just to quote a few. And now? Everything seems lost in absurd “bunga bunga” of sex and politics. That’s maybe why Yousef Moscatello left his country, became Muslim and with his video Fireworks, he focuses on the theme of destruction and losses. Transforming a firework’s timing of explosion, tipically a dangerous game of adult-born children in the south of Italy, he literally re-paints frame stills that, with a corollary of slowdown noises and undersounds, seems apparently an explosion of a fight in one of the numerous worldwide conflicts. Redefining the ephemeral aspects of a ludic event and a celebratory instrument, the fireworks turn out to be a like a menace of a bomb.
In other beautiful photographic works titled Feast Your eyes, he recreates the Mosque’s Islamic geometries scattered with eyes of women, carrying the mistery of the hidden, something often lost: people’s identities and integrity.
"Explosion", real firework exploded under wax inside a jar, 2008, is a beautiful sculpure of a pot of water with inside a potential treat: that of the “harm”.

Last, Istanbul, a complex city, full of multilayered realities which affect the region from many points of view, somehow losing its original nature: both religious, social and structural.
Barış Sarıbaş was born a political artist: strong, intense, versatile. From his obsession to portray the B52, the smart aircraft that drops missiles and bombs, he moves on to display a new series of works. They address the issues of lack of identity and gravity along with the loss and disappearance of sexual gender. Perhaps the next step, after all those bombs, will be the extinction of mankind! The art piece entitled Fake Gold represents thus a man made out of gold, a mask of himself or his personality, with a butterfly on his nose symbolizing the mutation of his body and conscience. The woman that brings to the surface of a calm still lake only the lens of a camera, has something mythological. It is somewhat like the sacred monster of art that not everyone can see and whose special presence is revealed only to a privileged elite, while it usually floats down the mire of the daily carelessness of many other people, especially ruler. As characters tend to vanish in our societies, so does the subject in the paintings. What is portrayed seems to be the viewers themselves. In this double shift of focus, not only are standpoints reversed (the portrait becomes the portrayer and the viewer becomes the artist), but painting and photographing are also intertwined in the artwork, as if the artist, by placing some cameras in his painting, were playing on puzzling perceptions taken out of their context. Verfremdungseffekt, the estrangement effect, which was held very dear by Bertold Brecht, interacts with artistic forms with a view to taking them out of themselves and depriving them of their own nature. By doing so, he provokes a feeling of alienation and total puzzlement. This feeling is necessary for one to come off the ground, get out of themselves and be enraptured by the enchanting world of art.

In the second period instead, the awareness gives way to the fallen illusions and the worlds become more than real. Baris, using a refined, elegant technique and large formats, has started to investigate the tools leading to the relations of power that his native land, melting pot of many people, possessions and civilizations, from the Ottoman empire onwards, has not been willing to sacrifice in order to keep a colonisation overpowered attitude. Like all the rest of the superpowered countries in the world!
At this point, then, it’s not important if his artworks are the direct Turkish result of either the colonial past or the more recent one, an investigation about the Iraqi, Palestinian or Iranian death. What strikes is a constant calling and high attention to war, where the possibility of the blessing of what is sacred and spiritual has been completely lost. What has broken the nest are bombs, bullets, missiles and gas masks. And, alas, all the suffering that they provoke to the mankind.