Nooshin Hakim Javadi
Nooshin Hakim Javadi is an Iranian artist working in the intersection of sound, sculpture and social practice. Her practice investigates the material culture of conict. Javadi has received several awards and fellowships including the Jerome Fellowship for early-career artists and was a 2018/19 Target Studio for Creative Collaboration Fellow at the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; Jerome Fellow for Franconia Sculpture Park and Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center, while completing her MFA in studio art from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Her interdisciplinary works and performances have been shown at Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany; Parks Exhibition Center, Idyllwild, California; Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey; Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim, Neuenhaus, Germany; Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Wisconsin; Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis. She is currently an assistant professor in the Stamp School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan.
I have been deeply influenced by confict and the subsequence process of repair. I find myself drawn to exploring the ways in which we respond and recover from moments of turmoil. And how these experiences shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. In my practice, I capture the transformative power of repair and the intricate work required to mend what has been broken. The act of salvagement has always fascinated us. Āina-kāri is an Iranian tradition of geometric mirrorwork that was born out of the desire to create beauty from the broken. This craft is a continuation of a 10th-century philosophy that emerged in the Middle East traced to Ibn Sina (Avicenna) who viewed existence as being at once singular, multiple, and unified.
We regard flags and political landmarks, considering what they bear as symbols of power for a viewer. How much of the viewer’s identity is reflected in those symbols?
The reflection of one's personhood can correlate with the idea of belonging and participation in the process and dynamics of political power. We must also reflect on stateless nations, the landmarks and symbols associated with such existence. How does the idea of reflection correlate to the idea of belonging? Belonging to a geography, a river, a mountain, a collective political imagination or history that is widely combined with colonization and marginalization? Being children of a habitat rather than its owners? Seeing civilization through coexistence within a habitat belonging to the human and non-human? Parallel to above questions another aspect of this body of work has been driven our attention.
The White House in Farsi has been translated into the White Palace! Kakhe Sefeed. As if in the subconscious of the language and Iranian history a house doesn’t embody the appropriate status —It has to be a palace. The authoritarian aspect of the power mounts the location in the subconsciousness of the language onto the symbol of such power “A king.” That is how cross-cultural projection takes place folding language-politics-history onto the same plain.
Pedram Baldari
Pedram Baldari is an Interdisciplinary Artist, Architect, and Scholar working in social practice, installation, sound installation, video, performance, sculpture, public art, and community-based work. His research focuses on the exploration of the themes of land through the indigenous-native-stateless lens versus citizenship-state-property, modes of colonialism, displacement-immigration, and conflict. His work is an active search for various forms of facilitating/envisioning realities by transforming/repurposing different means/tools/modes of the culture of violence.
His most recent land art project, The Heart of a Mountain, takes place in his homeland, Rojhelat (Eastern) Kurdistan, where he was born and raised in the city of Sine. This project focuses on the Kurdish ways of stewardship of the environment in Hawraman, where these high-altitude mountains served as a refuge to him and many of his people during the ethnic cleansing campaigns against them in the 80s.
Baldari has been featured in national and international art venues and biennials such as the Victoria & Albert Museum London, Documenta 13th Import-Export, Video Nomad Tokyo, Art Basel Switzerland, Walker Art Museum, Asheville Center for Craft, Weisman Museum, Plains Art Museum, South Dakota Museum of Art, Amarillo Museum of Art, Art Santa Fe Center for Contemporary Art, the Soo Visual Arts Center, and numerous institutions and galleries worldwide.
He has received awards and fellowships from institutions such as Delfina Foundation, Jerome Fellowship, and StarDust Foundation. Pedram is named 2021-22 the National Endowment for The Arts Awardee by the MacDowell Foundation. Baldari is the 2022-2023 Luksic Scholars Joint Research Awardee, collaborating with Pontificia Universidad Cat6lica de Chile and the University of Notre Dame. Recently, he received the 2023 Berlin BBA International Artist Prize. Baldari is the recipient of 2024-2025 The Arts Research: Incubation & Acceleration award, Office of the Vice President of Research and the Arts Initiative.
Pedram has been accepted to residencies internationally, such as Vermont Studio Center 2015-2020, MacDowell Foundation, Yaddo Foundation, Franconia Sculpture Park, Jentel Foundation, Sculpture Space, VCCA, Good Hart Foundation, Kunstferien Letchebach, and Delfina Foundation. Pedram has worked as an assistant professor in studio art at the University of Minnesota and the University of North Texas. He is currently based in the Detriot Metro Area and is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.
An intermedia exploration of the themes of land through the indigenous-native-stateless lens versus citizenship-state-property, modes of colonialism, displacement-immigration, and conflict serve as the main framework in my practice. In short, the intersectionality of power dynamics and systems of legitimacy in and out of the arts form a perspective through which I locate my work in today's contemporary art. Such methodology in my approach stems from the realities of my homeland, Kurdistan, and my people as the backdrop and, more often, the foreground of this unfolding parallel reality that I experience in America. Decades of ethnic cleansing of my people, the Kurds across the four states of Iran-Iraq-Syria and Turkey, a decade of Iran-Iraq war and continuous conflicts of regional power taking place in my homeland Kurdistan, the systemic oppression of my people through linguicide, occupation, poverty, forced migration, and ecocide of our lands, connect my narrative to that of the natives of North America and other stateless nations across the globe. This connection functions as the cradle of my art-making processes, investigating different layers of the Anthropocene and the possibilities of acts of healing.
Living in the United States, my relationship with the idea of homeland continues to exist in a state of in-betweenness. This permeates both the materials and working methods within my practice. I am actively exploring cross-cultural investigation by stitching aesthetics and repurposing metaphors, myths, symbols, and signs to deconstruct and decolonize the very fabric of my own practice and its visual and epistemological components.
In the spring of 2022, I embarked on a transformative artistic journey during my Good Hart artist residency. My initial mission was to create a site-specific Soundscape that delved into the environmental consequences of Enbridge Pipelines on Michigan's soil, particularly the devastating spillages on Anishinaabe lands. This exploration led me from Kalamazoo to Mackinac Strait, where I collected sounds from pipeline and spillage sites and engaged with tribal members to understand the historical injustices of genocide, land displacement, and forced migration that they endured. This experience opened a profound door of reflection on my own Kurdish heritage, marked by displacement, genocide, colonization, and enduring conflicts.
At each site of past oil spills, I collected not only sounds but also dead tree bark. My mixed-media ink drawings emerged from the process of archiving these sounds, creating a cognitive cartography that reflects upon the land, water bodies, and non-human existence through a reversed anthropomorphic gaze. Each artwork is composed around the tree barks to generate a field for the contemplation of the continuous lines and my poems in Kurdish and Farsi.
Unique to the drawings, these poems offer an imagined perspective of how trees, rivers, lakes, and animals perceive the Anthropocene. In one of the poems, 'Transactional Pain,' I explore the notion that humans are uniquely adaptable to pain, framing our world in a transactional paradigm where benefits must outweigh suffering for actions to be justified. This system permeates our workspaces, industries, wars, and governance, yet we impose it on the non-human world to measure their intelligence and agency.
My work seeks to reflect on the paradoxical economy of pain, contemplating the complexity of our interactions with the nonhuman.
FEVERED LINES | 2022. Mixed media, ink on paper, tree barks gathered from Enbridge Pipelines Oil Spill Sites, Poetry