This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Golnar Adili: Found in Translation: A Story of Language, Play, and a Personal Archive, curated and mentored by Kevin Beasley and on view at CUE Art Foundation from January 27—February 26, 2022. This text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.
Samanbouyan, 2008, Graphite on paper, 24 x 36 inches
[Image Description: On a sheet of white graph paper two Persian words rendered in a pixelated typography repeat in criss-crossing columns, forming an hourglass shape.]
“It is one of the strangest things, the fact that we are all going to die,” the late artist Christian Boltanski said in a 1990 interview. “We are all so complicated, and then we die… Suddenly we become an object you can handle, like a stone. But a stone that was someone.”
This transition from subject to object upon death is doubled when the deceased person leaves behind an overflowing archive full of objects that live on—deathless—after their demise. You are left with a surplus of objects: the objectness of the dead loved one as well as their personhood calcified into archival objects. Such was the case for Iranian-American artist Golnar Adili, whose father—a leftist writer and activist in the Iranian Revolution—left behind a massive, meticulous archive to the artist, his only child, upon his death. It took ten years for Adili to feel ready to comb through it.
It is fitting that the archive serves as a starting point for many of Adili’s works, given that her practice centers largely on the exploration and translation of materials. You can see the influence of Fluxus on her works; like Fluxus, her multidisciplinary practice privileges process over the end product and radiates playfulness, even when kneading through loaded concepts like diaspora, familial longing, and loss. Cast in a visual vocabulary of poems, letters, and the Persian alphabet, Adili’s solo exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation yokes together her investigation of the Persian language with her long-standing interest in geopolitical displacement.
She Feels Your Absence Deeply (2021) is composed of twelve miniature blocks that feature, among other things, images of her mother’s passport photo, an airplane ticket, and a pink letter from her mother to her father. Printed on these blocks are archival images from the years 1979-1981, when Adili and her parents reverse-migrated to Iran. There, in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, her father had to go into hiding to avoid government persecution, eventually escaping to the United States by himself. This long separation led to countless letters back and forth that are included in her father’s archive and gave rise to the affective sensibility that informs Adili’s practice. This sensibility crystallizes a theme woven throughout her earlier works: the permanence of political upheaval in the way it inadvertently becomes the entire landscape upon which life transpires.
An envelope from my father’s archive, sent between our address in Tehran and his in Northern Virginia. This envelope, like many other pieces in this archive, was salvaged from my studio after it flooded during Hurricane Sandy.
[Image Description: A water-stained envelope with a pink and purple striped border is marked with seven identical blue and orange stamps from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Handwriting in green ink marks the top left corner with Arabic text, and the bottom right corner with English text that reads: To: Mr. Mohammad B. Adili, P.O Box 681, Annondole VA 22003, U.S.A.]
Due to flooding damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, some letters and photographs in her father’s archive became stuck to each other. Adili chose to maintain these mergings, perhaps as a nod to their paradox: their inextricable, permanent nature was made possible only through the ephemerality of the archival materials. The only way for fragile materials and memories to become more permanent is, in this case, to combine and overlay — a literalization of Barthes’s observation that photography’s relation to loss is expressed as a unique superimposition of the past onto present realities. This, maybe, protests against forgetting.
Inspired by her toddler’s toys, this work literally deconstructs and reconstructs these visualized memories through the haptic medium of building blocks. But there’s a poetic charge in how the grievous concept of family separation is distilled into a form so innocuous, elemental, and universal as children’s building blocks, which can be contained in the palm of one’s hand. It is as if to say that in the face of the unanswerable tragedies of life, inflected by larger geopolitical forces, we retain a childlike belief in the possibility of simply piecing the fragmented family back together again into one coherent whole.
Wooden blocks appear again in the work Father Gave Water (Baabaa Aab Daad) (2020). It consists of a felt board with indents that hold the blocks, spelling out the titular sentence in Persian. “Baabaa Aab Daad,” associated with the children’s education specialist Seyyed Abbas Sayyahi, is the first sentence Iranian students learn in first grade due to its elemental linguistic and sound composition. The idea of the alphabet as the “building blocks” of language is literalized in the work as physical blocks that constitute each letter of the sentence. Adili chose this text as a way to revisit the fundamentals of the language, as she learned and forgot both English and Persian multiple times when she moved back and forth between the two countries as a child. There’s also something to be said about the centrality of the father figure in this basic sentence, and by extension, in the building of the Persian language. When juxtaposed with the absence of Adili’s father throughout her childhood, as well as the broader phenomenon of thousands of children losing their fathers in the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War that followed it, the sentence “Father gave water” assumes greater poignancy and evokes melancholic longing. Indeed, the artist remembers a revolutionary song from this time period that was used to galvanize the masses by reconfiguring the sentence “Father gave water” to “Father Gave Water is no longer our slogan, Father gave blood, Father gave (up) life.”
As both content and form, language supplies a structuring narrative to Adili’s exhibition at CUE. If Father Gave Water (Baabaa Aab Daad) investigates a didactic usage of the Persian language, other works in the exhibition excavate the language’s poetic possibilities. The point of departure for these works is the classical poem Samanbouyan (loosely translated as “The Jasmine-Scented Ones”) by the 14th century mystic poet Hafez. A poem that has occupied Adili for a long time, each of its stanzas is a meditation on life organized around a central wordplay between two verbs that are similar in form, but at times contradictory or different in meaning.
In the first stanza of the poem, for example, As the jasmine-scented ones sit, they settle the dust of sorrow, the words “sit” and “settle” stem from the same root (“Benshinand” / “Benshaanand”). In a series of silkscreen works entitled Samanbouyan (2015), Adili gives visual form to the tension in such verb pairs. Each work in the series, printed using light grey ink on layers of translucent rayon Japanese lens sheets that look as diaphanous as tissue paper, bears a pattern made of the word for “sit,” benshinand. These layers alternate with other layers featuring a pattern made of its paired word, “settle,” benshaanand. The patterns are tensely locked in place on the sheets while threatening to evanesce at the same time, due to the ghostly look of the papers. The ephemeral quality of these overlaid papers recalls the larger fragilities, longings, and hauntings that animate Adili’s practice. The iterative, meditative mark-making employed by Adili brings to mind the work of Dansaekhwa, a group of Korean painters in the 1970s who foregrounded mark-making as a way to cultivate a religious spirit. “Art is no longer an act of fulfillment,” the Dansaekhwa artist Park Seo-Bo remarked, “but an act of emptying.” But unlike the Dansaekhwa artists who sought to disavow pleasure in their process, Adili’s works are not bracketed off from the world, but instead revel in the playfulness inherent in iteration and repetition.
Comparative Benshinand and Benshaanand wooden constructions, 2020, Wood, Dimensions variable
[Image description: Persian verbs made from small wooden blocks]
In Benshinand-Benshaanad (As They Sit They Settle) (2015), Adili paired these two words together to create a vase-like shape (it looks like a “gentle slope,” she told me). The two repeated words slowly fuse into each other as they meet in the middle, like an X-chromosome, compressing and decompressing. Persian poetry functions almost as a form of emotional inheritance for Adili; her father’s letters in his archive are peppered with quotes from poems. As such, in Benshinand-Benshaanad, Adili conceives of Hafez’s poem as a literal vessel that symbolically holds and contains. The way her works hypostatize linguistic wordplay into spatialized forms and shapes speaks to her background in architecture (Adili worked as an architect for a few years before returning to art), as these works privilege the Persian language as typography—and topography—rather than calligraphy. By abstracting the words to look pixelated and modular, her works free the words from Western aesthetic expectations of calligraphy as a reified form of the Persian language and ask instead how the structure of language can accumulate in meaning.
For Complete Verb Pairings from Samanbouyan (2020), Adili created wood maquettes of all the verb pairings in Hafez’s poem. They are enlarged, three-dimensional models of the verb pairings, rendered in the same pixelated, geometric form as the ones in Benshinand-Benshaanad and Father Gave Water. It’s slightly disorienting to conceive of language in such spatial terms, and to see how letters of the alphabet might have a physical presence outside the bounds of two-dimensionality. We are so used to seeing letters mostly on flat surfaces—paper, screens, billboards—that we forget they may have a life in three-dimensional space if we allow it.
As such, the work bypasses the long-standing conflict between word and image, or the question of whether the visual must be consummated by the textual, by asking: why not just make the letters the image? By coalescing the visual and textual into one single object, Adili suggests an answer to the untranslatability of the visual—by offering a form of translation not just between the visual and textual but between mediums and forms. The title of the exhibition, “Found in Translation,” refers to the surprising and generative possibilities of translation as autotelic, rather than marked by distorted meaning, misunderstanding, or foreclosed desire, which all often attend translation. “Translation,” Gayatri Spivak states in The Politics of Translation, “is the most intimate act of reading… The task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow.” Instead of translating Persian poetry into English and thereby making Persian accessible to an English-speaking audience, Adili pursues other, perhaps more pressing, forms of translation: emotions into concrete forms, the two-dimensional into three-dimensional, and the self into affective material.
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.
Emily Chun is a Korean-American art writer based in New York. She has written for various publications such as the Brooklyn Rail, ArtAsiaPacific, and Ocula, and has contributed to curatorial projects at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Tufts University Art Galleries. You can write to her at emilyechun@gmail.com or find her on Instagram at @emchun.
Mentor Manijeh Moradian received her PhD in American Studies from NYU and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the former co-director of the Association of Iranian American Writers. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in Fall 2022. Her essays and articles have appeared in Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, Scholar & Feminist Online, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asian, Africa, and the Middle East, Social Text online, jadaliyya.com, tehranbureau.com, Bi Taarof, and Callaloo. She is a member of Jadaliyya’s Iran Page editorial board and a founding member of Raha Iranian Feminist Collective.