Rebirth was a combined art performance featuring contemporary music, visual arts and dance, based on Forough Farrokhzad's poems. Forough was known as 'Iran's rebel poet', renowned for her emotionally intense and formally controlled modernist poetry that celebrated the female perspective. An excerpt from her poem, Grieving for the garden, translated by Franklin Lewis in 1983:
Mother's whole life is a prayer rug
spread on the threshold of the dread of hell
Mother always searches in the depths of everything
for the trace of sin
And she thinks that some plant's blasphemy
has contaminated the garden
Mother prays all day long
Mother is a natural sinner
And she blows blessings on all the flowers
and she blows blessings on all the fish
and she blows blessings on herself
Mother awaits the advent
and the pardon that will descend
According to Franklin Lewis, the poem is, of course, an allegory, and is also one that walks a line between a domestic and a not so worldly-wise view of the world.
Rebirth explores the lives of Middle-Eastern women, their aspirations, obstacles, restrictions and freedoms, through the well known dancer Shahrokh Moshkin Ghalam, the classical singer Shirin Majd, and the artist Farnaz Dadfar.
Farnaz's decorative images and designs are closely related to the narrative painting tradition, where text illustrations provided sources for the literature theme specifically in miniature paintings. Here, the dominating patterns can be understood as techniques to link diverse content, or as defining organisation forms of knowledge and value judgments.
Farnaz Dadfar is an Iranian-born Australian artist based in Sydney. Her interdisciplinary practice is characterised by personal narrative offering a small window into an alternative realm of spiritual and philosophical experience. By recuperating specific characteristics of Persian Sufi poetry and Farsi literature as artistic material, she explores the concept of linguistic diaspora and flâneur through a lens of displacement and migration.
Images courtesy of the artist.