ARTIST RESIDENCY :: ZIBA RAJABI :: VISCERA::POETICS
For Tehran-born, Chicago-based artist, Ziba Rajabi’s, residency at Princeton University, Rajabi led participants through a multi-sensory, participatory non-verbal poetry workshop. Ziba invited us to think with our memories, the way they oscillate between two– and three-dimensions.
Ziba was painting imaginary landscapes inspired by German Romantic painter, Casper David Friedrich, before leaving Tehran for graduate school. These landscapes were imaginary because they were unseen by her until she met green hills in Fayetteville. Part of a distinct circumstance of legally-reinforced diaspora - by which we mean those who cannot return or visit due to legal limitations - she describes turning in her work “to tend to the dual reality I was experiencing: the physical space I was now in, along with the psychological space I regularly occupied, which consisted of memories, dreams, thoughts of home, etc..” Painting, to Ziba, is not only a manipulation of paint, she says, “painting, for me, has also been a representation of my body in space.”
For Ziba, for us, it matters that the sensorial can conjure more dimension from dimension; that stitched fabrics give a sense, a feeling of depth– the way your work can register the magnification and multiplication of memories through connecting with the visceral.
