Memory

MEMORY

The theatre of memory is unpredictable. The buoys of our intimate navigation are not only the events that are, by their nature, unforgettable, but often also apparently insignificant facts or images that insistently return to our memory.

That country road on a summer afternoon. That smell that we cannot even define, yet we recognise the same. Sometimes they are not even precise memories, but sensations, in any case indelible. ‘How long is forever?’ asks Alice. And White Rabbit replies, ‘Sometimes just a second. Sometimes for a lifetime.

Bahar Heidarzade has made memory the cornerstone of her artistic research. A choice rooted in her past, in the bold but painful decision to leave her family and her country, driven by the inalienable need for her to decide what to do with her life, to enjoy that freedom that we tend to take for granted, but which for too many women, in so many parts of the world, is still only a desire. A wish or a memory. As is the case in Iran, plunged in 1979 into the nightmare of a theocratic republic where freedom, in a painful temporal short-circuit, is both a desire and a memory of a recent past in which women were free. Free to choose how to dress, free to study, work, dance and sing.

On the other hand, history teaches. The timeline is not a bold straight line projected always and only forward, in a potentially infinite possibility of progress: instead, it knows painful curves, unpredictable u-turns. As that girl with the long black hair, proudly waving her hijab, knew so well in that photo that became the symbol of the protests in the autumn of 2022. Fifty years earlier her mother wore a miniskirt, how much will she have paid for the courage to have torn that veil from her head and waved it in the air like a flag?

Those who choose to leave must learn to come to terms with nostalgia, with that fierce caesura between before and after. For Bahar Heidarzade, art is the mastic capable of giving shape to the fragments of his past, sharp as glass, turning them into elements of a narrative mosaic.

In the Ten Years cycle of paintings, colour is a kind of mental secretion to which the artist entrusts the emotional writing of his story. Meaning is not exhibited in dialogic forms, but is the presupposition of a gesture that obeys the demands of a private narrative. Only the title of the cycle alludes to a precise time, a duration, suggesting adherence to Heidarzade's personal story.

‘They are abstract paintings, because they tell of a time in my life when the people I loved had disappeared, creating a void that ended up flooding my soul,’ Bahar reveals. It is up to the viewer, then, to interpret the chasms of white, the darkness of black, the scream of colour. The space of the canvas becomes the place of the seismography of an evoked pain, to be finally not removed, but communicated, even if in cryptic forms.

For Heidarzade, the telling of his memoirs is a necessity that never becomes arrogant self-telling: the indecipherability of his tale offers, in fact, each of us a chance to over-write it. Because only in this way can his story also become ours.

Each painting in the Ten Years series is a space for storytelling and listening. The original terms of the narrative, as well as the spatial and cultural distance between his country and ours, no longer matter. On the other hand, sharing is the other cornerstone of this artist's research. Transforming individual experience into a collective is for her a way to sublimate suffering, to transform pain into action to be performed together and, therefore, into potential redemption. A need that finds full expression in her performance works.

Figures that had not found a place in the paintings appear instead, in enigmatic form, in the works of the Memories series. They are old photographs of unknown people, mainly women, where the faces are erased by brushstrokes of colour, wax or the application of other materials. The face is the place of identity; to erase faces is to put those bodies into the circuit of a collective memory.

Once again, the evocation of the personal past, by its solipsistic nature, becomes a pretext for the telling of a memory to which it is up to us to give voice. Those faceless women, those children, in the denial of their identity, stage a drama where the characters wear the mask of those who have inhabited our history.

Critical text by MARINA PIZZIOLO