SHADI HAROUNI
Artist Statement
I collect facts and fictions on how power attempts to erase and abolish, and on the kinds of ingenuity and strategy the individual employs to resist full erasure. I’m interested in this history of resistance formally, emotionally, and politically. I dissect and imitate these strategies in the form of architectural interventions, sculptures, photographs, prints, and videos. My research centers on the metaphysics and absurdities of hope alive in dead bodies, forbidden objects and forgotten spaces.
A “forestation” project undertaken to erase the graves of three political martyrs, a factory built to conceal books in its foundations, objects buried wrapped in plastic in the hope of some future retrieval that is never to come. I look for them in abandoned factories and mountain quarries, guided there by a personal history that is forever entangled with stone, metal and myth.
Artist Bio
Shadi Harouni (b. Hamedan, Iran) is an artist based in New York and Tehran. Her work in sculpture, video, photo and printmaking engages with a history of erasure and resistance. Most recently she explores this history in quarries and cemeteries throughout Kurdistan. Harouni’s art and writing have been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian and Shifter Magazine, among other publications. She has been awarded a Harpo Foundation Grant, A.I.R. Fellowship, residencies at Fondazione Ratti (Italy), SOMA (Mexico), Lower East Side Printshop (NY) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Harouni holds a BA from University of Southern California and an MFA from New York University/Steinhardt. She teaches art and theory at Parsons The New School and at NYU.