Fabrications
Taraneh Hemami engages diverse strategies including installation and media productions as well as collective and participatory projects to explore themes of displacement, preservation and representation.
Artist BioFabrications is a pop-up bazaar of ideas and ideologies that celebrates movements of dissent in Iran and its diaspora through the production of collected historical archives in hand-crafted replications, using the traditional bazaar architecture. Using hand-made and manufactured wares and objects which carefully replicate portraits, logos, slogans and maps, the project creates memorials to time, place and people, while building a repository of knowledge that make visible an otherwise unaccounted for history. Fabrications is part of the larger Theory of Survival project, which, since 2007, has amassed historical archives from local communities and the web through residencies and collective efforts. This material includes decades of otherwise banned and censored printed matter belonging to the Iranian Students Association of Northern California, which was active from 1964-84 and reflects the political sensibilities of its time.
Taraneh Hemami
San Francisco, CA
Taraneh Hemami was raised in Tehran, Iran, and lives in San Francisco. In her work, she engages diverse strategies including installation and media productions as well as collective and participatory projects to explore themes of displacement, preservation and representation. Examining the careful crafting of images as propaganda for power and political gain, Taraneh’s handcrafted reproductions of historical archives serve to commemorate events, places and people, while commenting on tools of manipulation and persuasion used across nations and histories. Her sources vary from fuzzy images of international terrorists downloaded from an U.S. governmental site for an examination of perception and stereotyping in the Most Wanted series to a collection of banned books and propaganda of the Iranian underground movement that describe the Iranian revolution in the Theory of Survival project. Taraneh’s conceptually driven works shift in material and presentation from shimmering shattered glass prayer rugs to a laser-cut wool carpet map of the city of Tehran.