Raha Fard

The Evanescence Video Installation

The video is created from the Evanescence Archival Performance Series (a photograph series conveying kinship through land and identity. Around 700 photos were taken while I was moving unconsciously with a Persian carpet covering my body). conveying the interconnection between my soul, my body, and the land from which I am coming. Each body dissolves into the next one, and the traces of the previous body, what it has perceived, and how it responded to the trauma will continue to exist in the next body. The video depicts my body's integration of what it has gone through to that point in time and place every single second.

The audio for the video is the documentary sounds of the streets in Iranian cities, during the Woman-Life-Freedom revolution, while the security forces are shooting unarmed people. My body gets shot, with each single shooting, and the pain spreads through my body until it is profoundly annihilated.

The Evanescence Video Installation.

The Evanescence Archival Performance Series, Photography- Digital Collage-Printed on Office Paper.

The Evanescence Archival Performance Series, Details.

Overall View, The Evanescence Archival Performance Series, The Evanescence Video Installation, and The Blood Traces Series.

The Evanescence Video Installation and The Blood Traces Series.

The Evanescence Video Installation, Photography- Digital Collage-Video Art.

The Woven Bodies Series

I am floating in blood. Innocent people are being executed each dawn. Their eyes will not leave me, their enthusiastic eyes, that are filled with hope. My body is woven in the pains and suffering I perceive from their traumatized bodies. I feel smothered by my sympathies. I repress the anger inside my body, the anger that comes from the sense of being helpless in my existence.

For The Woven Bodies Series, I incorporated my body’s silhouette from the Evanescence Archival Performance Series, to make the floral patterns of Persian rugs’ various designs, by digital collage in Photoshop, and woven by jacquard loom, to evoke the carpet’s embodiment for the audience, and resonate with the interwoven pain in my body. My body is repeated between the textile patterns of the Persian Rug and the photo-documented performance act of being covered by the rug itself. The photography series brings the unsettlement, isolation, and suffering of my body into the work.

The Woven Bodies Series, Photography-Digital Collage-Jacquard Loom Weaving.

The Woven Bodies 1, Woven Series.

The Woven Bodies 2, Woven Series.

The Woven Bodies 2, Woven Series, Details.

The Woven Bodies 3, Woven Series.

The Woven Bodies 4, Woven Series.

The Woven Bodies 4, Woven Series, Details.

Overall View, The Routes of Blood 2 and The Woven Bodies Series.

The Routes of Blood 2 Sand Installation

The work speaks of a land experiencing a deep melancholy taking hold of people’s feelings. The land in which the strong bodies of men lose their strength under the pain, and mothers become mourners as the sun rises. The Routes of Blood 2Sand Installation’s creation embodies my body's physical presence, soul, and mind in space at the same time. It internalizes the sense of empathy through the physical and mental struggle and my unsettling position in reconstructing the Persian rug as a link to my motherland. The Sand speaks to my interconnection to the tactility of the soil of my homeland, and its running through my hands while creating the work resonates with the time for me. In every single second I live here, a governmental murder might happen in Iran. Time runs through my hands like sand, which evokes the passage of time from an hourglass.

By bringing my body's silhouette into The Routes of Blood 2 Sand Installation, I add the sand images of my body created with my hands to the work, which creates another layer embodying my physical presence, soul, and mind. Also, the vulnerability and ephemeral nature of the sand installation resonates with the fragility of my body and soul. This design is inspired by Kheshti-Bakhtiyari Persian rug. The pattern of this carpet involves fifteen separate squares with six different floral patterns, which are created from my body's silhouette in the sand piece.

The Routes of Blood 2 Sand Installation, Sand Drawing.

The Routes of Blood 2 Sand Installation, Details.

The Routes of Blood Uninstallation Performance.

I erase my body's image on the sand, through its movement, to evoke the impermanent nature of the sand installation and intertwine my ephemeral existence into the work. This resonates with the fragile emotional state of my daily life while perceiving a third space between my geographical space and my mental space. It felt meaningless to smear the sand with anything other than my body. The Routes of Blood sand installation brings the warmth of my homeland as a Persian rug, but disappears in a second when I touch the sand, like a dream that disappears with a sudden move.

The Routes of Blood Uninstallation Performance.

The Routes of Blood 2 Sand Installation, after the Uninstallation Performance.

The Routes of Blood 2, after the Uninstallation Performance, Details.

The Blood Traces Series

The Blood Traces is a series of six blood paintings, which were done with my own blood. The paintings are from six selected photos of the Evanescence Archival Performance Series, which integrate my discomfort, loneliness, and traumatized body into the work. The blood carries me, and what I have gone through in my life. It carries the history of my inside and outside. This series of works addresses the pain in my body that is intertwined with the affliction derived from many traumatized bodies in Iran. The silhouette portraits are extracted from my blood and applied with a brush crafted out of my hair on my white T-shirts. The Blood Traces Series not only resonates with my medical and psychological history but also evokes the blood stains on the clothes of killed and injured people.