Siah Armajani: Follow This Line

Curated by: Clare Davies, Victoria Sung and Victoria Sung. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis | September 9, 2018–December 30, 2018.

In Follow this line Siah Armajani remembers and retraces Iranian children ’s habit to trace  their daily itinerary from home to school roughly on the walls, singing “Follow the line”. The gesture and the subjective sign represent the real desire of “being a part” of the space. The topography of the city becomes a net of biographical and emotional spoors. Architecture preserves and shields the unbearable lightness of being."

Siah Armajani: Follow this line is the first US retrospective dedicated to the work  of the Iranian-born artist Siah Armajany (1939). The sources of his poetics and dialectic can be identified in his early Iranian formation. Armajani’s father was an important retailer of refined textiles from Europe and the artist received a Christian education, which represented a minor choice in the religious community of Iran. At the Teheran University the author examined Western Philosophy in depth and admired the cognitive survey of Hegel, Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. He was also intimately interested in Persian knowledge and poetry, that re-emerged  in his first “pictorial” works which were influenced by Calligraphic art Miniature. In 1960 Armajani moved from the native Teheran to Minneapolis to attend Macalester College in St. Paul and he still lives in America, where he could interact with a heterogenous and various cultural panorama. From the 80’s Armajani has developed an artistic research based on public ad architectural structures – bridges, gazebous, housing and benches – where  both the individual and collective needs  are investigated by means of  elementary and diverse materials. The architectonical quality of these projects is characterized by moderation and clearness.

 

Authors: Clare Davies, Victoria Sung

Publishers:Walker Art Center/ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

448 pages

7.5 c 10.5 inches

Publication date: 23 October 2018

Text by: Valentina Bartalesi

http://www.artbook.com/9781935963196.html