| Date |
Thursday, February 4, 2010
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| Time: |
6:00pm – 8:00pm
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| Location: |
Soho20 Chelsea Gallery: 547 W 27th St., Suite 301, NYC
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Soho20 Chelsea is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Aphrodite Désirée Navab (b. 1971, Iran). She Speaks Greek Farsi opens with a reception for the artist on Thursday, February 4, 2010 from 6-8 pm and will be on view until February 27th.
In this photographic performance series, Navab’s abdomen serves as the site of performing language. An expression in Greek, to speak any language in a “Farsi way”, is a comment on how fluent and well someone speaks that language. So to speak “Greek Farsi” or “English Farsi” is to speak Greek or English well.
From the concrete world of her embodied experience, language is abstracted. At once personal and universal, private and public, Navab writes words on her skin from the flesh of her own tri-cultural heritage. Words whose meanings, however, hold great potency for anyone who has had to relocate and emigrate: family, place, language, love, friend, birth, land, home, person, history, life, memory, body, self, and world. These fifteen concepts were chosen as the most re-defined issues in her life’s transitions and translations from Iran, to Greece, to the United States of America. Navab writes and erases on her belly, building a memory of marks, and ritually re-enacting the erasure and the re-membering brought on by forced migration.
Tags: Aphrodite Desiree Navab, She Speaks Greek Farsi, Soho20 Chelsea