Koushna Navabi has focused her works on the aspects of the complex relationships between the West and the Middle East, and between craft and art. Knitting and embroidery feature in much of her work, often depicting historical images and traditional Persian motifs combined with scientific notation.
An opening reception will be held on Tuesday, February 24, from 18:00 at Xerxes Fine Arts, located at 1 St James's Market, London SW1Y 4SB.
Koushna Navabi was born in Tehran, left Iran in 1979 and lived for fifteen years in New York and Los Angeles. She currently lives and works in London. She completed her M.A. in Fine Arts at Goldsmith's College in 1995 and has exhibited in the UK and internationally.
The cross-stitch pieces depict newspaper photographs of Iranian political events. These works conjure the memories of childhood and create an evocative space in which to consider the politics of exile in the context of pattern, craft, beauty, shame and the conventions of men and women's work.
The carpet bears an nontraditional motif. The deceptively decorative pattern illustrates a geophysical view of an area of the Persian Gulf sea floor. Navabi worked with a geophysicist to represent the details of a graph used to locate, drill and extract the oil that has been at the heart of the relationship between the Middle East and the West for the past century. The carpet was produced in collaboration with the Institute of Weaving in Tehran using traditional methods.
Since 1996, Navabi has been making oil paintings depicting the knitted surface and using the language of painting to expose the aesthetic and gender politics implied in the distinctions between art and craft. In this work, the traditional motif of birds and flowers appears to be represented in knit but as the viewer approaches, the artifice that has produced this illusion of craft become apparent.
You're So Iranian (Female Erectile Tissue) explores the fundamental oppositions of interior and exterior, public and private, functional and ornamental. It takes intimate, hidden female organs and renders them triply estranged by making them visible, by transforming them into sculptural and public objects and by putting them into a surreal but personal context evoked by the use of a traditional and domestic Persian-patterned fabric.
The 'Crude Oil Molecule' series depicts an unsettling combination of beautifully embroidered and apparently three-dimensional ball-and-stick models of the structure of hydrocarbons that drift over the surface of a 19th framed century Persian textile motif. The works are the most overtly political of Navabi's work to date while still exploring the themes characteristic of her work including the paradoxes around art and craft, female and male work and the domestic and public.
