Yasi ALIPOUR
BIO
Yasi Alipour, (MFA, Columbia University, 2018) is an Iranian artist/writer currently based in New York.
"I think we live at a point of extreme darkness and extreme brightness. Extreme darkness, because we really do not know from which direction the light would come. Extreme brightness, because we ought to have the courage to begin anew. […] We have to construct another political thought, another political imagination, teach anew the vision of a future." Michel Foucault writes these inspiring words in 1978 on the eve of Tehran’s revolution. It is as inspiring as it is sad. History would fail him. The result of his hope became the suppressive regime.
In the same year, Edward Said sat somewhere in New York to write Orientalism, my generation’s blueprint to understand our troubled Middle East. Years later, he would say the book “is written out of an extremely concrete history of personal loss and national disintegration.” We swim in his despair knowing our future desperately needs more.
One either hopes or not. I spiral / One either thinks or act / Unable to settle with either, I make.
My hands lead the way. I long to speak with my regions history of visual arts beyond the Nationalist and Orientalist narratives. So, I stare at what has always inspired me, geometric abstractions found in all its ceilings, architectures, carpets, designs, and everyday life of my region. Using only my hand and paper, I test, examine, sketch, draw, sculpt, and make. The paper gives a chance to be fragile, to move, to test, to play, to fail. A universe slowly opens up to me that is far beyond my education, Modernity’s binary logic.
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