“Artists are rather living beings who, in the use and only in the use of their members and of the world that surrounds them, gain experience of themselves and constitute themselves as forms of life."
(Giorgio Agamben, Creation and Anarchy)

In her performances, as much as in the poetic activity of ceramic fabrication, Simin Eivazi’s body stems from her political given, her heritage: that of domesticity, exile, the history of Iran, and Iranian women. A performance like Spring redistributes the political given in space through objects, images, and the continual movement of the artist. Here, the body does not merely refer to the “thing of the world” but to the material organization of the subject’s identity. Thus, the artist’s relationships with her native Iran or the United States, the site of her first exile, emerge to constitute the artist’s singular identity—at times divergent, at times resonant. The performer’s body is recalled to its historical and political given, mobilizing this given as a material no longer fixed, deterministic, or passive, but as a plastic material upon which she can act. This plastic conception of the world and the body offers a certain hope for the political scope of our actions and choices, particularly those of the artist.

Iranian Qajar iconographies illuminate a past to which the artist is attached, both through her origin and her future. Indeed, these images render the present possible as they “make history,” establishing a “feminist” precedent dating back to the 19th century. In this sense, they root the contemporary claims of Iranian women in the present. When Simin Eivazi lifts a pot with female figures of Qajar inspiration engraved in clay, from which pomegranate leaves from her garden spill, one seems to see these figures come to life. Like the living tableaux of Paradjanov in Sayat Nova, the performance reactivates the past and inert objects in a powerful choreographic movement. Through gestures that could continue indefinitely, the artist’s performances place the spectator in a full-body contemplation. Gestures, images, and objects resonate with collective life, daily rituals, and traditions: libations, balance, breaking, dressing, cooking, wrapping oneself in a sheet… These gestures have neither beginning nor end until an accident—the doily falling at the artist’s feet—reveals the contingency of life within these ritualized gestures. Rituals, then, only serve to create a canvas from which life, with its accidents and singularities, emerges. The contingency of the doily’s fall highlights the universality of the gestures.

Textiles, through skin-to-skin contact, bear the marks of the bodies that made and wore them. They manifest the dialectic of presence and absence. In the performances, textiles are activated through touch, erasing the distance between bodies: the artist’s body and those of the women who remain in Iran, especially her own mother. The poetic activity of ceramics, meanwhile, seems to align with the praxic dimension of performance. Making, glazing, firing are as many gestures that transform the body and offer perspectives through which it develops. Objects are not finished upon their creation: they are part of life. Thus, in these practices and objects, and through the pomegranate tree brought from Iran, the continuity of bodies takes shape—bodies that move around the tree, feeding from it, here and there. In Simin Eivazi’s work and life, the pomegranate tree embodies the vitality of this corporeal solidarity between those who stay and those who leave. It is also a recurring element in Iranian homes. Whether represented or spread like purifying water, the pomegranate is a source of hope. Through the tree, textiles, and ceramics, we see the continuity of bodies sharing common points of reference, roots, or recognizing their divergences. Action always arises from the bodies of those who came before us, those who will follow, those who stay, and those who leave. “Their presence exists in my body today,” the artist will say. Through a simple and extremely pure way of performing, she offers an intimate and powerful aesthetic experience. One can easily receive Simin Eivazi’s work, as it awakens something in the deepest part of our gestural understanding of the world. This work operates at the level of what Wittgenstein calls forms of life. If forms of life are sometimes foreign between Iran and the West, they are also sometimes shared and common. Thus, one can communicate with the “elsewhere" (for the spectator) that is Iran through the artist’s proposition. This work, in its entirety, embodies Agamben’s statement: “[They] experience themselves and constitute themselves as a form of life.” Indeed, the highly personal and singular dimension of Simin Eivazi’s proposal opens up intersubjectivity, making a shared experience possible. We thus share a common “form of life," which is the foundation of an aesthetic and political solidarity.

Ultimately, everything in Simin Eivazi’s work is about the body, from its extension and materiality to its representations and standards, through its artifacts (ceramics, textiles, plants, various objects…). Everything is related back to this body, which is the standard of existence. As spectators, we cannot dismiss what our bodies testify to, what they have the power over, and what they outline for the future. It is a work that enjoins us to rise to what our bodies demand, in terms of solidarity, commitment, and understanding.

Text written by Emera Segarra , professor of philosophy and art historian, translated from its original French