My series “Portraits” consists of life-size photo prints of a diverse group of women. The portraits serve as a canvas upon which I use different materials and media to express their identities while also showing the obstructions between the women, their faces and the outside world. Much of my previous work has served as a critique of the enforced veiling of women that I grew up with in Iran – many times through different expressions of the naked female body (see a sample in attached works). This new series, however, provokes a very different notion. I am using real hair, sewn on the portraits as flowing from the women’s heads, while covering their faces. Their identity, this work will suggest, stems not from the physical appearance they are born with and which society seeks to control. Instead, it comes from their personalities, their works, and their abilities.
About Sara
Sara Madandar is a US based artist from Iran. She was born in Tehran. She got her MFA at the University of Texas at Austin. She currently works in painting, sculpture, video and performance. Her works changed after her moving to The United States. Her work is mostly about the relationship of the human to their bodies and covers. She materializes the issues of existing in an in-between space through construction and deconstruction of the canvas. Her work evokes a sensation out of destruction and touches on the cultural displacements of corporality. Her sculptures are objects related to the human body and are in actual size of the body. Her video, video installations and performances are influenced by her emigration and comparison between two cultures. She uses different elements to transmit her concepts such as patterns, hair as lines, women’s body and etc. She uses different media and technique to show her concept.
Cool concept and execution – bravo!