Art Affects: The Artist’s Body considers the body as both a tool of creation and a subject of art. Historically, the female body has been represented through the male gaze. This online exhibition reclaims the gaze and presents the female artist’s body from her perspective, emphasizing self-representation, self-empowerment, and the emotional as well as social, political, and economic contexts that influence artistic creation.
Exploration and representation as empowerment is a central theme of the exhibition. Azar Pajuhandé, Mahsa Mohammadi, Nasim Goli, and Pooneh Oshidari assert their own unique narratives of the female body and identity. Confronting the male gaze and challenging traditional modes of representation, expressing anger and dissent, exploring pain, connecting with the non-human in nature, and moving the body into abstraction, they share their artistic experiences, thoughts, and emotions. Their works place the woman and the artist at the center, redefining how they and their (self-)representations are viewed and appreciated.
This online exhibition also challenges stereotypical and orientalist perspectives and offers new artistic viewpoints. Art Affects: The Artist’s Body emphasizes the need for a transcultural perspective in the debate on gender and identity politics in the visual arts.
The exhibition will be online until October 13, 2024. Simultaneously, from September 9 to 22, 2024, a selections of works by the four artists will be also shown in the temporary mohit.art Project Space at Goebenstr. 10, 10783 Berlin – until September 15 daily 10:00-18:00 (CET) and September 16-22 by appointment.
This is an exceptional opportunity to acquire such captivating pieces at a compelling price. All works in both exhibitions are available in three price categories:
A) 250-550 EUR
B) 650-1,200 EUR
C) over 1,200 EUR
The complete list of works from both exhibitions can be downloaded here.
Please contact us at buy@mohit.art for more information, the detailed price list, and your questions.
I feel that our bodies serve as a site of both empowerment and oppression, often regulated by societal norms that define “womanhood” through a patriarchal lens. This creates a tension between our personal autonomy and the societal pressures to conform.
In my art, the body transcends physicality and becomes a tool for exploring identity, power, and resistance, where the personal becomes political and the boundaries between self and other are redefined. The body, when juxtaposed with non-human beings, invites me to reconsider its centrality to existence. It is not a fixed entity, but part of a broader, interconnected web of life, intertwined with nature and other bodies.
Thus, experiencing my own body as a woman, artist, and human being involves navigating the intersections of gender, imagination, creativity, and species identity. It requires embracing the complexities and contradictions of these identities, acknowledging both the limitations and the possibilities that come with being embodied in a world that constantly defines the boundaries between self and other, human and non-human.
As an artist, my body absorbs and internalizes societal definitions and interactions with other bodies, processes and transforms these influences into output, and redefines itself in relation to the world around me, blurring the lines between different forms of life and all that we know as bodies.
The essence of my art lies in exploring the body, both human and non-human, often through the transformative qualities of dough – a material that embodies the duality of life. Dough, with its pliability and responsiveness, is a medium that reflects the organic, ever-changing nature of flesh. It is a substance that is both alive and inanimate, evoking the primal connection between the body and the earth.
In my work, I use dough to create forms that resemble bodies and body parts, yet they are abstracted, dehumanized. The dough in its raw state is soft and full of potential, much like the human body in its most vulnerable, unformed state. As the dough rises and transforms, it undergoes a process of becoming – much as the body grows, ages, and eventually returns to the earth.
The relationship between dough and body, bread and flesh, is deeply symbolic. Dough is the raw potential, the body in its most basic form. When it is baked into bread, it becomes something nourishing, life-sustaining, much like the flesh that carries life within it. Bread, as a final product, represents the culmination of a process, a moment when the ephemeral becomes the tangible, when the potential of dough is realized into something that can sustain life.
This connection to nature and other bodies is integral to my work. The act of working with dough is an act of communion with the earth, an acknowledgement of the cycles of life, death, and rebirth. The body in my art is not just human, it is all things, it is animal, plant, earth. My art is a meditation on this interplay, on the ways in which the body is both of the earth and beyond it, transient yet eternal.
I create the “bodily affect” in my art by intentionally juxtaposing contrasting elements, to evoke a visceral response. By positioning these objects in unexpected and unsettling ways, I aim to disrupt the viewer’s usual cognitive associations and make familiar things feel unfamiliar. This defamiliarization creates a tension that engages the viewer’s emotions, drawing them into a space where pleasure and discomfort coexist, allowing them to viscerally experience the sensations and emotions embodied in the work.
February 2023
It’s been almost three hours of morning sleep since the last bout of diarrhea. As soon as she opens her eyes, she tries to gauge her inside and make sure that everything is working properly. It sounds to her as though the indisposition has truly passed. It’s almost twelve twenty when she finally gets up. She slips smoothly into the red floral satin robe de chambre and tightens the belt firmly around her plump waist. Barefoot, she limps into the kitchen, prepares something small and eats it. Then, she wonders how to dispel the hollow emptiness of Sunday noon, but quickly remembers that for her, Sunday is no different from any other day of the week. She realizes that she has vainly allowed clichéd thoughts to enter her mind; the emptiness is merely the same everyday emptiness she has often enjoyed and sometimes not.
Very early in the morning, she had woken up abruptly. Her body and mind were still tired. Last night was an exception; she usually spends her time in solitude. She feels that in solitude, she’s easily herself, while in the presence of others, she has to constantly strive to be someone. After all, she finds it occasionally pleasant to be someone, as long as it’s not out of compulsion. But on the whole, she prefers to be no one. One could say that the woman lives in a flat world of images, as if in the real three-dimensional world, she is merely an observer — albeit a perfect one. She does the work of observation with a kind of hunger and relishes wandering around. In her view, to be no one is to wander around; it is sheer freedom. But if you decide to be someone, you have to surrender to various rules, and structures will constantly frame you to define your shape, making you visible and perceptible. Once you become perceivable, it’s over. In contrast, someone who is no one can be anyone; there are infinite ones within them. Therefore, their solitude is not synonymous with loneliness.
She had wondered: “Does this sound too Christian? Am I weaving all this together because I’m afraid of loneliness?” She had not even been in the mood to catch — or not to catch — herself red-handed. She had let go of the thoughts and struggled to pull her body — which felt heavier than usual at that moment — out of the mattress. She had gone to boil some water for coffee, hoping, as she imagined, to relieve the headache from last night’s excessive drinking. We know, however, that not only did she not feel any better, but also her gastrointestinal condition became unsettled; she had to flush nearly twenty times in one hour. Eventually, closing the bathroom door in utter exhaustion and frustration, she hoped it would be the last time. Thank God, it was.
I know it won’t surprise you to hear that she’s a painter. Now she takes her notebook and materials, then repeats the spell as part of her daily routine: *«أنا عصفور و هذا قفصی» (I am a bird and this [body] is my cage). Then she releases her waist from the pressure of the belt and sits naked in front of the tall mirror. She touches the mass of her hair, which has become frizzy. The only solution that she can think of is to catch the rough mass on top of her head with a small pencil, which is exactly what she does. She soaks her index finger in spit and draws it firmly under her eyes, attempting to remove the remnants of last night’s makeup — which has now left her face looking completely pale. She draws her shoulders back assertively, refusing to allow the weight of her breasts to bend her back forward even a little. She rotates her body slightly to the right, but her head is facing the mirror. She opens her legs. This is her favorite gesture in front of the mirror. Shortly after observing her triangular figure, she is reminded of the arid mountains of the Tehran-Qom road — the route of her frequent childhood trips to her ancestral city.
She was leaning to one side in the back seat of the car, the hot midday sun shining through the window and casting a warm glow on her small, round face. Iranian pop music from the 90’s was playing. Father was driving, and mother was peeling an orange. Next to her, her sister had fallen asleep with her neck tilted, a thin strand of saliva dripping from the corner of her lips. There was not much to see through the trapezoidal window of the car: only the sky, the orange mountains, and passing cars similar to their own. One of her feet was loose on the floor of the car; she had taken off the shoe from her other foot, bent the sock-wearing leg at the knee, brought it up to her belly, and rested it against the seat. She separated the orange slices and popped them into the mouth one by one, her eyes fixed on the barren landscape of this wasteland.
It’s been her preoccupation from childhood up to this moment, sitting in front of the mirror: “I wanna sit somewhere and look at what’s in front of me.” It seems simple, but as we know, very soon the complexities creep in; as soon as she begins to observe, fantasies sprout from the bottom of her mind, and a labyrinth begins to roar in her head. So she paints to take control of her emotions and to avoid wandering aimlessly through the labyrinth of her mind. But she delights in being immersed in her dreams, savoring the details she remembers.
She lifts her right foot off the floor and places it on the short wooden stool to get a fuller view of her body. She places her left hand on the upper part of her left thigh, while her right hand hovers in the air, as if ready to grab something at any moment. She grabs the brush from the table next to her, dips it into the jar of water, and then lands the wet brush on the orange watercolor pan. She moves her hand swiftly and smoothly, gliding the paint soaked brush across the paper. The thin, transparent layers sometimes drift apart and sometimes merge. This is the method: first, she observes with intent; then, as she engages with the blank paper, moments cascade over each other like waves on the sea. Perhaps nothing else in the world soothes her mind as floating in this pleasant, fluid sequence.
After a few minutes, she relaxes her eyelid muscles, allowing the two once-tightened apertures of her eyes to return to their natural size. She gently places the brush on the table and holds her empty hands up, palms facing upward, while her thumbs delicately trace small circles on her forefingers. Still gazing at the mirror, she no longer seeks to delve into her image. Instead, she contemplates the reflection of his image within herself and, like a child, she is filled with rapture.
*Al-Ghazali, one of the greatest Iranian Sufis of the 11th century. I first encountered this quote in the cult film The Ceremony of Love (1987), directed by the lesser-known Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk. In the film, the quote is followed by: “Only women and poets understand this.”
We don’t have a tradition of masks in Iranian culture, as far as I know. My first contact with masks was in European museums, where I studied them. Masks inspired me because they hide real faces and create a different identity. But my masks, instead of hiding my face, reveal me and my personal history.
I started to work with clay here because after 10 years in Germany I was questioning my sense of belonging. I was looking at myself and how I had changed during that time. But I was also thinking about Iran and the mythologies of water and earth. This came after I traveled in Iran again and talking to my brother about Iranian architecture and Qanats. The mud architecture and the water transition in the Iranian plateau are the themes that have always interested and inspired.
The Faces series is also about how others perceive me. Speaking in different tongues and how this affects my daily life. Am I the same person when I speak in Farsi or German? I don’t think so. One face of me learned Farsi as a child and another face of me learned to speak German as an adult. I don’t see language just as a means of communication, it also affects our body, our identity. I see a big difference in every sentence I speak in another language.
I went from orientalist paintings to the theme of “bathers” in art history. I drew these female bodies outside of their paintings and their context of interpretation. For me it was like looking at the female bathers through the eyes of a male artist. Maybe there’s a difference when we talk about the male gaze in general and the male artist’s gaze. In the case of the artist, when he shows us his gaze, we can play with the agency, try to change it.
Through their paintings, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jacques-Louis David try to show us their “orient” and “oriental” women’s bodies as a fact. But they’re not a fact. It’s the male, European artists’ agency that makes these “oriental” women and men slaves and slave traders.
Here they are again, the naked women, the Bathers, to be gazed at for another round.
My feelings about my body are very ambivalent. Like many other women, I have struggled to accept my body shape. Especially in my school days in Iran, I became more cautious about my body after we were given rules about how to cover up. So, like all of us, I started sexualising my own body parts to understand why I had to cover them. Why should I cover my body, which parts and why? The answer is: I have to cover my hair and curves because of the male gaze. My high school was a religious school, and I am still amazed at the amount of moral body-related rules they enforced.
What I am saying is that social norms have the biggest impact on how women in particular perceive their bodies. At the same time, I think it is more than social norms. When I went back to Iran in 2023, in the middle of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, I went to a kebab shop in Iran Street, which is in a traditional, religious area of Tehran. There were many families there, women in veils, even face veils, were not uncommon here. I sat down, wearing a dress without a headscarf, and I didn’t feel anyone gazing at me. Sometimes it is important to step out of our bubble to experience and accept other women’s perceptions of their bodies.
After Woman, Life, Freedom, people in Iran have been discussing the female body and its presence in public spaces. When I listened to some women on the bus in Tehran talking about the need to cover the female body, it brought back memories of my school days. My feelings about my body probably have a lot more to do with my memories than I thought.
Self-portrait is a situation to face oneself honestly, without any filter, without any considerations or curtains. Talking about violence, fear, threat, loneliness and other unpleasant situations is not easy. It is like facing what is gathered under the skin of the body, the hair and the eyes and can come out at any moment with a thin scratch. Meeting this shell will create a different perception in each space.
Meanwhile, red traces signal destruction, or a message of the absence of life is visualized. Meanwhile, it is the nature of nothingness that gives meaning to the content of the image, to remind us once again of the most fundamental concept of human life, which is the value of living in the midst of turmoil and unpredictability.
If we define a work of art as the relationship between the artist, her body and the environment, then the self-portrait or the representation of (my) body is a way of understanding my own position in relation to the surrounding situation. We are very vulnerable in the face of aggressive conditions and events that are beyond our control: conditions that exclude or ignore us, a situation that causes suffering and insecurity.
While in my earlier works I cover my self-portraits with growing and spreading elements to show this vulnerability, omission and neglect, in these new self-portraits – The Wound series – I openly and directly show my anger and protest against any kind of exclusionary factors.
For me, the female body and the potential of motherhood are connected to nature. In ancient Persia, the woman was a symbol of the earth and the nurturer of creatures; she was to be respected and cared for. In fact, it was the earth – the bearer of the natural elements – that was compared to the mother: The deity Spanta Armaiti or later Sepandamarz is the guardian and goddess of the green earth and a symbol of fertility and birth. I like the challenge of working with the connection of land (earth), home (motherland) and femininity in my work. And to relate to the now.
In The Motherland series, I speak of the worrying conditions of the Iran environment today. The earth is suffering, wounded, and full of pain. Her children are wandering, vulnerable due to the loss of their mother and carer. Also here, I seek to deal with the suffering and the limitations we see around us caused by unwanted and unpredictable factors and conditions.
