Roksana Pirouzmand makes sculptures, installations and performances that are informed by personal experiences and an exploration of being in contact with the physical qualities of these mediums. The finished forms are never static. Producing casts of her own body, and that of loved ones, she  translates the shapes into materials such as fired clay and pigmented wax. These severed extremities erode over a prolonged period of time, that is, by having water fill a ceramic head that slowly cries away its contents, legs and stones being dragged around a room in haunting motions that gradually pulverize the hardened minerals, or lighting the wick at the center of a palm ready to consume itself. The outstretched hand is not only a ubiquitous position seen in daily interactions, but the hand placement of many figures of worship. Although the body is not always present in other works, as in the fan-like candle structure and the dress hanging by a multitude of threads, it’s rhythmic looped motions recall the actions of a repetitive ritual, and the side-to-side pulling amid two walls evokes physical and psychological displacements stemming from being in-between contrasting cultures. Now inhabiting this space, which is also a private residence, each work creates a distinct atmosphere with mechanisms that deal with opposing kinetic forces, utter otherworldly sounds, and compromise the movements of those around them.

Words by Fabiola Talavera

CURATOR

Fabiola Talavera (b. 1995, Monterrey, Mexico) is an independent curator, writer, archivist and cultural producer based in Mexico City. Currently she coordinates Montez Press Radio in Mexico and is a regular writer for Elephant Magazine.

CURATOR

Jo Ying Peng (b. 1982, Taipei, Taiwan) is an independent curator currently based in Mexico City. Her practice ranges across curatorial, editorial, and cinematic boundaries to expand possibilities beyond linear narratives.

a proposal.

"I couldn’t remember any others besides ‘under the skin of the house,’" Roksana replied when I asked about the working title of her earliest proposal for the exhibition, which may still be waiting to come into being. But it is not a simple past tense—ever absent, yet never truly gone.

The idea of that unfinished proposal centres around hospitality, inspired by her first visit to Vernacular. Roksana proposed creating an upside-down space, draped with collected furniture and garments, animated by hands and motors like a puppet show to construct a theatrical, imagined “home” inside my home.

"I still remember the temperature of the sofa and the window in your studio," I said, after visiting her in LA. During our two-hour meeting, I sat on that sofa—used for the piece Tapping, Rocking, Remembering—facing the window from the piece Between Two Windows. The exhibition-made windows: one modelled after her house in LA, the other resembling her grandmother’s home in Iran. Furniture carrying jet lag, serves the scenario. Silent and anonymously.

a script.

The mise-en-scène is shaped by the idea of “home,” narrated through the question: What are the "things that can happen in a room”?

Scattered limbs, limbs in motion.  

With the measurements of ears, mouths, and fingers.  

With gestures of care.  

With intermittent actions, calculated for the choreography of friction.  

Finding gravity, regaining gravity, detaching from gravity.

‘Your body wakes into its quiet rattle

Ropes & ropes

How quickly the animal empties

We’re alone again with spent months’ (Time Is a Mother, Ocean Vuong)

Intentions weave a subtle thread between receiver and activator, a wordless dialogue suspended in the air. As I navigate the rooms while installing, Roksana’s ongoing staged ‘home’ unfolds—a landscape unearthly, etched in memory. I move from one space to the next, seamless yet adrift, as if immersed in the pages of a Roman-Fleuve—a family’s chronicle, quietly confronting the traces of violence embedded in its history.

a letter.

Memory as a restorative space. They exist between motherland and unfamiliar ground.

“Who can hold a fire in (her) hand by thinking of the frosty mountains” (Shakespeare)

The figures of three-dimensional sculptures do not become vivid, but instead grow increasingly blurred with time. In the end, what remains clearest is that absence—ever present, yet never vanished. An echoed memory.

But it is not a simple past tense. 

Words by Jo Ying Peng