Maryam Taghavi مریم تقوی

For the next iteration of its Chicago Works series, the Museum of Contemporary Art presents the first solo museum exhibition of artist Maryam Taghavi (b. Tehran, Iran; based in Chicago, IL).

Taghavi’s practice insists on positionality: where one stands determines what—and how—one sees. For the past several years, her work with talismans, calligraphy, and the Islamic occult has coalesced into a series of sculptures and paintings that strive to signify the unseen. In her upcoming MCA exhibition, Taghavi creates new works that expand her interest in perception by interrogating the space between the illusive vanishing point of the horizon and the immutability of distance.

Taghavi’s exhibition will take over the MCA’s Turner Gallery on the fourth floor, culminating in an immersive installation that invites audiences to close one eye and peer with the other, to adjust their gaze to new spatial possibilities, and to imagine a relationship with what is imperceptible.

Link to the Exhibition Page

Text by Curator Bana Kattan:

Maryam Taghavi and a Choreography for Nothing

BANA KATTAN

In Persian and Arabic, the noghte is the most essential diacritical mark. The number of noghte(s) that a writer places above or under a particular letterform indicates its sound: for example, the same letterform may become b, y, p, n, t, or th, depending on the noghte’s arrangement. Loosely translated into English as “dot” or “point,” in calligraphy this diacritic is etched from the slanted nib of a reed pen, creating a diamond-like form. In the early tenth century, a vizier to the Abbasid caliphs in modern-day Baghdad named Ibn Muqla developed a system for determining the size of letters in an alphabet based on the noghte. Muqla began by calculating the height of the first letter in the Arabic alphabet, the alif, based on the height of a series of noghte(s); he then determined the size of all other letters in relation to the alif[1]. Since Muqla’s invention of this “proportional script,” the noghte has been used as a unit of measurement for all spatial relations within a given calligraphic composition (fig. 1).

Figure 1. A 19th-century lithograph of script in the Naskh style, one of the earliest forms of Islamic calligraphy. Courtesy of Borna Izadpanah.

For artist Maryam Taghavi (b. Tehran, Iran; lives in Chicago, IL), the noghte is to literary culture “what the seed is to a tree. It’s impossible to think that this small unit is holding the blueprint for a whole tree, but it’s in there. And I think of the dot or the ‘noghte’ in the same way, that it’s like the entry to a whole world.”[2] In Taghavi’s solo exhibition at the MCA, Chicago Works: Maryam Taghavi, the noghte emerges as a central motif that influences both the construction of meaning and how one perceives distance. In the installation, paradoxically titled Nothing Is, Taghavi carefully utilizes elements of a visual culture that she grew up with, such as traditions drawn from Islamic calligraphy, Persian miniature painting, and Persian architecture. Taghavi’s treatment of these traditions is reverential, but it is also subtly irreverent. Using irony, abstraction, and transliteration, her work moves between the transcendental and the transgressive—a transition reflected in the space of the exhibition.

Before visitors enter the exhibition, they are welcomed by a series of cut-outs in the shape of noghte(s) made in the external gallery wall, part of a piece called Quadrilateral view (2023). When visitors peer through this aperture on either side of the wall, they encounter a mirrored prism installed within. This prism houses countless reflections of the noghte motif, a nod to the concept of infinite possibility in Islamic geometric patterns. Here, Taghavi carefully manipulates materials and light to create something that transcends physical constraints to become infinite and, perhaps, magical. Taghavi’s prisms, including this one, are mobile vessels that manifest in different ways each time they are installed in a new space, revealing many versions of infinity.

A second prism, Pentagonal view (2023), is revealed upon entering the exhibition. It is housed within the wall of another work—a site-specific architectural intervention titled Hashti (2023). Designed by Taghavi, the walls of this space form a 12-sided shape, or dodecagon, modeled after a geometric space in Persian architecture. Known as the hashti, this liminal area connects the gate or entrance of a building and the doorway leading to the interior. Traditionally, the hashti serves as a mediator between outside and inside—a place to pause and acknowledge transition.

As visitors progress from Hashti into the second gallery, Taghavi decisively pulls back the curtain to offer a glimpse into the innerworkings of her process. She reveals the reality behind her prisms by displaying a third prism, Unfolded Hexagon (2023), unwrapped, or disassembled, on the floor of the gallery, and a fourth, Triangular View (2023), installed as a free-standing sculpture with which visitors can interact. Here, Taghavi affirms the magic inherent to these works—and then purposefully negates it by revealing the illusion.

Nearby, six of Taghavi’s paintings from the series Horizon are set against a dark green background. These large-scale, airbrushed works evoke a fragmented horizon, suggested by the familiar noghte, which appears in clusters of three, five, or ten. Taghavi describes the horizon as “the place where the earth meets the sky, an imagined line that our eyes make up, a distance we cannot reach . . . I think there’s something incredibly powerful about that mode of imagination.”[3] Nodding to the noghte’s origins as a form of measurement, these works invite the viewer to consider that uncertain line, and the assumptions their eyes make about its distance.

By pushing back on the viewer’s perception of space, Taghavi’s paintings engage with a longstanding artistic tradition prevalent in Persian miniature painting in which artists flatten the horizon line, thus obscuring the viewer’s depth perception. Historically, Western works of art were governed by the laws of perspective. Three-dimensional space was projected onto a two-dimensional canvas. Artists painted toward a vanishing point to mimic how distance is perceived in real life. While artists in the West concerned themselves with painting reality, Persian miniaturists “presented things as they should be, not necessarily as they are.”[4] Objects in the background were not depicted as being smaller as they moved further from the foreground. Instead, they were placed at the top of the painting, where they remained proportionally the same size as those at the bottom of the painting. The miniaturists’ vertical approach invites the viewer to “perceive space in a more active way,” where “individuals become part of the whole picture, the whole surrounding space.”[5]

As an Iranian artist living in the diaspora for more than 23 years, Taghavi’s practice can also be considered through the postcolonial writings of Homi K. Bhabha. In his book The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha writes, “The ‘beyond’ is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past . . . we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.”[6]

In Taghavi’s work, these crossings are both physical and imaginary. To live in the diaspora is to live outside of context. Similar to Taghavi herself, the noghte has been taken out of its literary framework. In the Horizon paintings, the noghte is fragmented, unable to complete the horizon line. It floats in isolation from the letters it ordinarily adorns, allowed only to hold its basic form. In other works, such as within the expanse of the artist’s mirrored prisms, the noghte is liberated, bending and morphing in the light, adjoined to nothing. Again and again in Taghavi’s work, we are asked to use our imaginations. To connect the dots, to dream of the horizon. To face incompleteness, and to exist in the in-between.

In his writing, Bhabha also insists that migrants are active, and not passive, subjects in the transmission of culture—from homeland to host land and back again.[7] This is a useful framework for situating contemporary artists such as Taghavi within a broader, generational shift in Iranian art history identified by scholar Hamid Keshmirshekan. In his essay The Question of Identity vis-à-vis Exoticism in Contemporary Iranian Art (2010), Keshmirshekan describes how many artists working in the 1960s—such as those associated with the Saqqakhaneh movement—incorporated preexisting decorative and traditional motifs related to the ancient, religious, folk, and calligraphic arts in their practice. Their work was identified as especially “Iranian.” While these Saqqakhaneh artists were keenly interested in drawing from Iranian popular culture, those who followed them opposed the use of cultural codes and stereotypes that risked carrying a sense of exoticism into the West. Consequently, over the past two decades a younger generation of artists presented work that featured ironic, kitschy, and sometimes humorous approaches. Through this deconstruction, these artists challenge exoticism, posit a multiplicity of identities, and defy the notion of a singular, unified identity expressed by the previous generation. Yet despite their differences, when compared these two groups share a core concern of collective belonging: where the older generation focuses on national artistic identity by celebrating the traditional, the newer generation challenges the concept of fixed identity through critical and subversive expressions.[8]

Visitors to Taghavi’s exhibition encounter this dynamic in a work titled Heechi (2023). The sculpture is inspired by the artist Parviz Tanavoli, nicknamed the “father of Iranian sculpture,”[9] who pointedly uses source material rooted in Iranian culture and translates it into modernist and abstract forms—such as in his Heech series, which he began in 1965. Referencing both Persian literature and calligraphy, his series uses characters to spell out the Farsi word heech, which translates to “nothing,” a concept used in the Sufi spiritualism of renowned 13th-century poet Mawlana Jalal al-Din Muḥammad Rumi, whose verses explore the concept of nonbeing—not as the termination of being, but as the path to fulfillment and the wholeness of being.

Though Taghavi’s sculpture Heechi is inspired by Tanavoli’s Heech series, she has added a single letter to the word, transforming “heech” into “heechi.” In contrast to “heech,” which represents a nothingness that leads to wholeness and fulfillment, the word “heechi” can be translated into a nothingness that represents emptiness and void. In Taghavi’s words, “that level of divine is removed from it. It’s very much looking down on earth and the everyday . . . [heechi is] the nothing as it appears in life’s disappointments or despair.”[10] If Tanavoli’s Heech series affirms a spiritual tradition, Taghavi uses linguistic slippage and transliteration to question, subvert, and reveal the Heechi. She is not only defying tradition—she is defying an older generation’s fidelity to that tradition, as well as challenging the notion of a fixed identity. “The way of heechi is recognizing my distance to the context where it comes from, to what actually constitutes this idea of perfection and what is profound and spiritual,” she says. “So, I am removing that as a way of recognizing how impossible it may be to hold on to those ideas and thoughts, from where I stand.”[11]

The final work in the exhibition is a small calligraphed text. It is the only work that contains multiple words. To create it, Taghavi commissioned calligrapher Parisa Shafiei to etch an excerpt from a poem [Ghazal #551] by the 13th-century poet Saadi Shīrāzī in a style of calligraphy that is purposefully devoid of noghte(s). Without them, the reader needs to slow down to access the meaning of the text. The poem reflects on the state of longing and the persistence of a beloved’s memory. Elsewhere in the exhibition the noghte refracts through a prism or floats in a painting, separated from the context of letters. Yet here, in Taghavi’s final work, readers experience the inverse: the pure context of letterforms devoid of the noghte(s) that provide their discerning sounds.

In the poem and across her practice, Taghavi uses removal and abstraction to address distance in several forms: spatial, generational, and diasporic. “I am not practicing calligraphy. I am not practicing this perfection,” she says. “I am far away from the context that it comes from. I do have this thread to this language, to this culture, but it’s really hard to preserve it . . . with the distance that I have from it [and] with the time that we are living in.”[12] In Nothing Is, Taghavi asks you to become an active participant in experiencing this distance. If you choose to partake in her choreography of bending, peering, imagining, and connecting, you get to participate in the act of transforming from heech to heechi—materially, conceptually, and experientially.

Permanent Installation, O’Hare Terminal 5 Arrivals

mixed media, gold leaf, acrylic mirror, two way mirror

The calligraphic script in the vitrine is a creative appropriation of an ancient talisman containing names that are believed to possess protective qualities. These names were calligraphed in Persian in the 17th-century by Abd al-Qadir Hisari to resemble the form of a ship, and for many years were inscribed on Ottoman ships to safeguard them on their epic journeys.

The names inscribed on the talisman are derived from the tale of the Seven Sleepers, a popular story in both Christian and Islamic mythologies. According to the myth, seven men and their dog sought refuge in a cave to escape religious persecution, and miraculously stayed asleep for three hundred years. They later awoke, unharmed and unaffected by the passage of time.

In this rendition, the seven magical monikers that form the talisman join forces with a new name: Zhina. Zhina Mahsa Amini's name has become synonymous with the Woman, Life, and Freedom movement in Iran and her inclusion signifies the transformative power of a name – serving both as a memorial and a profound catalyst for change. The names on the talisman are a testament to the potency of language and symbols in preserving history, catalyzing change, and shaping collective memory.

In the vitrine, the talisman takes on a new form: the single script multiplies, creating infinite reflections of shimmering golden hues. As the viewer moves, the reflections shift and disappear into the depths of the vitrine, blurring the boundaries between reality and illusion. This play with perception challenges the viewer's ability to distinguish between what is real and what is a mere mirage.

Top 5 Booths at EXPO

By Hamza Walker

These paintings consist of a single sigil, an occult letter-form believed to cast a spell upon its viewer. This sigil is derived from a 15th century Persian talisman promising the power of flight. In this incarnation, the sigil appears in arrangements invoking new spells whose central subject is wish fulfillment. The paintings playfully underscore the power of the sigil as the letter-form is formally subject to improvisatory “flights” of fancy. The compositions are framed in colors whose shades and variety instigate a viewing pleasure that, as it relates to the wish, serves as a downpayment.

In terms of both paint application and support, these paintings have a playfully uneasy relationship to a Western, fine art, painting tradition. Despite their having been incorporated into the fine arts, airbrush and stencil belong as much, if not moreso, to graffiti and commercial illustration than easel painting. Of all surfaces, the stretched canvas is arguably the most foreign to airbrushing, an application that is most at home on automobiles. In this respect, the unstretched canvases read as decidedly provisional. If anything, they are mediators between airbrushing directly on the wall and the lone painting on silk, which is suggestive of a scarf. In other words, the canvases are literally caught between so-called “street art” and the decorative arts. Just as the primacy of painting as the standard bearer of the visual arts is being invoked, however provisionally, it is also being tampered with.

But don’t let the absence of stretcher bars fool you. They are very sturdy paintings nonetheless. What they lack physically is recuperated graphically courtesy of the broad, colored border. As a floating configuration and reconfiguration of a stenciled calligraphic motif, the imagery, however, is not structured by the border, which reiterates the rectilinear edges of the canvas. The border is squarely a frame demarcating a visual arena. It is tethered to the imagery more through color than geometry in any compositional sense. Moreover, given that it has been applied directly to the wall, the imagery has been shown to be fugitive. It need not play inmate to a frame doubling as prison guard. Having relinquished their stretcher bars, maybe these canvases are not so much a prison as a halfway house. Unlike traditional painting whose imagery serves a life sentence, these paintings offer its imagery the possibility of parole.

Preamble to the US constitution appears as vinyl on wall, but once the viewer gets closer and peers in, they can see the reflections of the text “inside” the wall and see their own reflection in it as well. There’s a box placed inside the wall, all sides covered with acrylic mirror to create a hollow space where letters are “floating” in an unexpected order. This encounter invites the audience to recognize their own relationship to “we the people”.

This exhibition was produced in tandem with a solo booth at Expo, both resulting from a long research on a single image from a magazine during the Iran-Iraq war between 1980-1988. The number on the windows in Farsi represents the lives that were lost during the war. To highlight the value of each body usually overshadowed by the numbing effect of distant statistics, I subtracted the commonly used statistical number of 1,000,000 by one as a way to account every life that is lost due to socioeconomic and political conditions. Placing the number on the streets of Chicago, with a high number of street violence brought a local dimension on how differences in value of life directly connects to racial, gender, and regional inequalities as well. This piece is accompanied by a drawing that consists of nearly 1000 points that delineate the shape of a riser paired with reproduction of the image in silkscreen.

This lecture performance reconstructs elements of a photograph through writing, sound, and movement. Close attention to the image, now from a distant vantage point in space and time, offers previously unavailable revelations. It depicts a seemingly ordinary training session at a stadium in Tehran of 1984. But upon closer inspection, the photo becomes evidence to the events that drastically shifted the sociopolitical landscape of the region. This live performance sets out to read beyond what the image immediately represents, and by doing so gives shape to a sequence of events that are absent yet connected. By using technology retroactively, this performance searches for the imaginary possession of the past and the con- sequences of its narratives for the present. Ronen Goldstein makes live sound for the piece.

Flight into the Abyss appropriates an image- cut out from the sports column- of Keyhan newspaper published in Iran, 1984. The picture depicts an Olympics training session at the Shiroodi Stadium in Tehran: the athlete’s body suspended and the coach standing against the stadium backdrop. In what appears to be an ordinary local event, the three words on the stadium banner The Fate of War, shift the paradigm of the image. These words, epitomize the state’s rhetoric that heightened during the Iran-Iraq (1980-1988), where the war machine, in every aspect of its operation became a divine endeavor. Iran referred to the war as the “holy war,” and the rhetoric of a jihad expanded well beyond the battleground and into the fabric of the society. Mainly achieved by mythologizing the human suffering as the ultimate form of redemption.

I placed an Islamic talisman for protection on watch at the window of the Hyde Park Art Center. This talisman is a calligraphic arrangement that includes the name of seven men who were saved by God’s miracle as it is mentioned in Ashab Kahf chapter in the Quran. During seventeenth and eighteenth century it was widely used by marine explorers to protect themselves from turbulences of the unbound waters. In this reincarnation the talisman is meant to be utilized for public protection and those bodies who need protection from precarity and uncertainty.

These two words, سرنوشت جنگ are cut out of the wall so viewers peer “inside” the word, where numerous optical illusions dispute the initial encounter with the form. These two words borrow from a powerful propagandist slogan that was popular during the Iran- Iraq war. It ultimately implies a power or agency entirely hinged on the divine force (Allah), to render the grotesque realities of war as transcendental.

Even though this method is specific to the propagandist machine of the 80s in Iran, this same method of sacrifice and redemption bares true to most dictatorial regimes. The promise of afterlife as the ultimate place of happiness.

This collaborative installation grew out of a site specific exploration of both the entrance to the house and the front porch. By an unusual shift in one’s sightline before entering the house, Taghavi and Burtonwood delay the experience of passage from one place to another. The installation consists of two parts: four acrylic mirrors are mounted above the doorway, originally designed by architect Arthur Woltersdorf in 1910. These panels extend away from the ornamented entrance and arch over the viewer’s head. The uncanny visual experience of the concave mirrors dislocates one’s perception of their body in relation to itself, and to its surrounding. The body centers, doubles and disappears, while its image is caught between what is behind it and what is before it. In this sense, the street, the garden, and the porch appear on the same plane where the reflection, by its infinite play, slows down the the body before stepping forward. The space of transition, therefore, becomes a place of lingering.

Window, on the south edge of the porch, replicates the floral concrete relief (allegedly designed by Richard Bock) that surrounds 6018North's doorway. The synthetic material of the "new" flower fast forwards the ornamentation to the present, overlaying the stable modernist structure with an organic form, highly receptive to wind and light. The transparent orange and blue flower draws a line to the house next door: the light reflects into the porch during the day and at night casts a shadow on the neighbor’s brick wall.

This project, in contrast to the iconic Chicago architectural ornamentation, proposes a fragile intervention onto the secure structure of the building to draw attention to the existence of itinerant lives and qualities inherent to it.

This Islamic talisman is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection. It is a fragment of a tile from the facade of a 14th century building in today’s Uzbekistan. The ornamentation along the bottom half of the tile, contains a calligraphic phrase from the Quran, which is muslim proclamation of faith. and says: لا اله ال الله. “There is no God but Allah”. The phrase was integrated in the facade of the building for protection. Inscribing a phrase or name from the Quran onto a surface or object is a common practice in the Islamic tradition for protection and healing. These talismans appear in numerous forms and materials from architecture to jewelry, or from inscriptions with thread on fabric to inscriptions on weapons.

My reach for this talisman was in response to the Executive Order 13769 that issued a Travel Ban on muslim countries by the Trump administration in 2017, popularly known as the Muslim Ban. I was seeking something for protection and resistance to this sudden shift in the reality that has just unfolded before us.

For the exhibition, Reconstitution, I painted the U.S. constitution in Farsi on the façade of the gallery and its interior walls. This gesture was a means of signifying current debates on immigration and foreign policy, and how they bear on a sense of national identity. This backdrop for the exhibition raises the question to whom is the constitution illegible to and to whom are its policies and principles serving.

Article published on THE SEEN magazine, by Nilour Sarlaki

I hold a large mirror in front of my body while walking inside the galleries and hallways of the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. The camera captures the walk: the surface of the mirror deflects the objects and the architecture on its surface, further obscuring the body, turning it into a mere surface.

Video, 29:35

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/182174229

Josh Radian and I used tropes of our respective spiritual and religious traditions (Islam and Buddhism) to reflect on after life fantasies. The performance field became an escape from ideas that inspire the postponement of earthly pleasure, and those that encourage the renunciation of desire to overcome suffering. While both traditions have personal resonance for us, they act on different registers of belief, practice, and the body. This project mirrors contemporary questions regarding religion and the body, the ethics of killing (both have engaged in holy war), and the aesthetics of ritual.

Translating literally into English as place- to-place, jä be jä is a Farsi expression that signifies movement or displacement.

Once embodied, its experience may range from trauma to privilege, but it is in either case a state of transience that demands perpetual negotiation. jä be jä is a curatorial project that activates a space for correspondence between artists based in Iran and artists based elsewhere. Throughout the course of the project, participants from each location work together in order to trace one another’s proposals in their own locales. For this iteration - the first iteration of jä be jä - eight artists and two theorist/translator, and a graphic designer inhabit, through a series of conversations, the space between Tehran and Toronto as they respond to the theme of distance. This space ultimately lends itself to contemplating, utilizing and elaborating on the act of translation, extended across both literal and metaphorical dimensions. This laboratorial exhibition aims to investigate the dynamics, tensions and potentials of dual agency in production, to relinquish the privileging of production over process, and to enable a more immediate interaction between different artistic discourses and find points of contact between them.

https://issuu.com/maryamtaghvai/docs/borchure_ja_beja_