Ghazel: Mea Culpa at Carbon 12
Today, from our friends at REORIENT, we bring you a review of Ghazel’s latest solo exhibition, Mea Culpa, on view at Carbon 12 in Dubai through May 9. Author Sayantan Mukhopadhyay says of the artist, “Her interventions—which start with materials and symbols inherently laden with meaning—speak about the itinerant lives in a manner that is refreshing when placed in conversation with the many other contemporaneous works dealing with identity crises posed by global nomadism.”
Ghazel. Phoenix IV (detail), 2015; acrylic and ballpoint pen on two printed maps of Iran; 39 x 55 in.
Walking into a gallery space punctuated with works subject to viewers’ experiences and possessing the ability to be read through those experiences: an exhilarating sensation. “Global contemporary” is a moniker that commonly encompasses a tradition of obscurity for obscurity’s sake, a fearful label that connotes unapproachability for the masses. It speaks to the elitism of a world of characters that effortlessly transmigrate, hopping from one biennial to another, with other art fairs scheduled in between. Ghazel’s work, however, is explicit in democratizing thematic enterprise, and it is this plainspoken and sensitive treatment of diaspora and exile that has made her latest solo exhibition, Mea Culpa (Latin for “my fault”), so successful.
Ghazel, most commonly known by her first name alone, is an Iranian artist who has been living in France since the 1980s. She pursued a formal education in visual art, completing an MFA at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Nimes. The decades following her departure from her native Iran have been devoted to developing a language that addresses processes of rupture and the growth of a set of peripheral relationships between experiences in Iran and France. Ghazel’s work has largely used performance as a conduit to understand post-revolution Iran as viewed from a distance, although her more recent bodies of work have spanned a broad array of media.
