Open Frequency 2007: Maria Kheirkhah by Cherry Smyth

Open Frequency 2007: Maria Kheirkhah by Cherry Smyth Maria Kheirkhah, Portraits of a Suspect, 2006. DIN A4

Critic, curator and poet, Cherry Smyth profiles the work artistic practice of Maria Kheirkhah


Maria Kheirkhah explores issues of identity and cultural dissonance through installation, photography and sculpture. With a strong knowledge of both European and Middle Eastern cultures, Kheirkhah manages to address the misconceptions and outline the parallels between them. In 'See, Hear, Speak' (2003) she uses her own hair as a veil to question ways in which women in each culture are silenced and have to endure their position. Using a soundtrack associated with belly dancing, it restricts the shot to a close-up, thereby denying the exoticising gaze. She at once creates an identity and conceals it, conveying her sense of frustration with being caught between both worlds.

'In Love with a Red Wall' (2003) looks at the ideological walls we have all grown up with, whether its the Berlin Wall, the Wailing Wall or the cinematic wall of romantic projections. She uses the visual poetry of the Farsi language to great effect in 'Khamoosh', 2001. Khamoosh means unlit, silent, dead and in lighting a series of candles laid out in the shape of the word, the artist defies its meaning and power to silence her. Kheirkhah makes a poignant comment on exile and the life-force of belonging in 'Baged Air from Yazd', 2005, in which she captured air from a desert region in Central Iran and brought it back to inhale in the UK.

A more recent photographic series 'Portraits of a Suspect' (2006) uses humour to highlight Islamophobia in Western culture and highlight the ways she is tempted to hide her Muslim faith. The strength of Kheirkhah's powerful interventions are their multi-entry viewpoints, demystifying the Iranian female subject while also questioning the role of women in the West. I have nominated Kheirkhah for Open Frequency to support an important artist - she is at a crucial point in her career and deserves more recognition. (Cherry Smyth).

Born and raised in the North of Iran, Kheirkhah first came to the UK in 1979 where she pursued her art education, specialising in sculpture. She travelled back to Iran in 1988, teaching at two major universities in Tehran, Alzahra University and The Academy of Arts. Since her return to the UK in the early 1990s she has exhibited extensively both in the UK and internationally.

Kheirkhah's cross-disciplinary works achieve an interplay of poetic, formal and conceptual devices, using a range of metaphors to explore the dual influences which have shaped her intellectually, emotionally and artistically. She is as much influenced by her Iranian heritage as Western culture, having absorbed the formal language of Western art for the past 15 years: her Eastern influences are embedded in classical and contemporary Persian arts - classical 16th-century miniature paintings, Persian architecture, both sacred and secular, and many contemporary Iranian film makers who explore these themes; her Western influences are just as extensive, particularly the work of Lebanon-born artist Mona Hatoum and Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid (Rachel Garfield, Unpublished interview with Maria Kheirkhah, 2003).

The performative works see the artist employing her own body to map out instances of trauma, memory and spatial navigation (Sara Raza, 'Travelling Light'). Dealing with the personal rather than the explicitly political, the works are charged with issues relating to identity politics, though are not the result of a process of making visible a critical, theoretical or literary position, but rather inflected with many influences, often in an oblique or subliminal way. As Sara Raza discusses in 'Travelling Light', Kheirkhah's conceptual performances reflect upon ideas concerning home, sanctuary and space which straddle both the West and the East, inspired by 'a reciprocal desire to comprehend existence as one moves from one sphere to another, utilising both the public and private domain of the UK and her native Iran, opening up a two-way dialogue between cultures ... The visual journey that she carries out implies a unique approach to the poetics of immediacy within the discourse of feminist practices, both actual and assumed, principally defying stereotyped notions of mild and subdued 'feminine' or 'feminised' approaches concerning gender and ethnicity'.

Dr Amna Malik, lecturer at the Slade School of Art, UCL, London, has written extensively on issues of Diaspora-based art practices in Europe and the USA, including the work of Shirin Neshat, another prominent Iranian-born artist. Malik remarks on Neshat and Kheirkhah's differing approach to referencing Iranian cultural politics in their respective practices: 'Shirin Neshat's films, made by a crew of Iranian-Americans, are a series of melancholic meditations on an Iran that has vanished and arguably only exists in the nostalgic memories of the Diaspora. If her filmic vocabulary finds its textual inspiration in Iranian women writers, its visual form is drawn from European art films as much as contemporary Iranian film, and marks the significance of a visual language that is syncretic. By contrast Maria Kheirkhah's sculptures deploy space as a politicised arena within a practice that is deeply conditioned by debates in the West concerning post-colonialism and art practice, drawing upon the Minimalist sculptures of Mona Hatoum and Rasheed Araeen, both prominent contributors to the British black arts movement of the 1980s. If Kheirkhah's references to Iranian cultural politics are deliberately oblique, they nonetheless condition her awareness of the need to counter the orientalism of Iran and the Middle East in western representations' (Dr Amna Malik, abstract, 'From Exile to Transnationalism in the Iranian Artistic Diaspora', for lecture series, Persian Culture and Heritage, The British Museum, 2005).

Cherry Smyth, March 2007


Artist's biography

Maria Kheirkhah studied sculpture at the University of Central England (MA Fine Art, 1986-87) and Surrey Institute of Art and Design (BA (Hons), 1983-1986). Her selected exhibitions include:

Portraits of a belly dancer, Brixton village, London, 2006; Art East Biennale 2005, Bishkek, Kyrgystan, 2005; Kisss on surveillance, Melbourne, Australia [travelling internationally], 2005; Souvenier, Florence Trust, London, 2005; Performance, Artivist, Peckham Square, London, 2004; Curator, theNomad Travelling Show, Babol, Iran, 2003; Khamoosh, Horniman Museum, London, 2003; Heroes & Holies, Ev+a biennale, Limerick City Gallery, Ireland, 2002; Stories of 2002 nights, Briggite March Galerie, Stuttgart, Germany, 2002; No Place, Pump House Gallery, London, 2001; Pellegrinaggio e memoria, Martini Arte Internazionale, Cavagnolo, Italy, 2001; Versus VI, Velan Centro Darte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy, 2000; Silent Carpet, site-specific installation, Camberwell Arts Week, 1999; Chasing Dreams, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1999; Contemporary art, The Museum of Contemporary Arts, Tehran, Iran, 1990; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1987.

Her work has been reviewed in a number of papers and publications including Performing Difference, published by Arts Admin, 2004; Global mediation: Leeds 2006, published by the AAH; From exile to Transnationalism in the Iranian artistic Diaspora, organised by The British Museum and the Iran Heritage Foundation 2005; Dr Amna Malik, Revolutionary art, Barakat foundation 2005; Sara Reza, 'Kisss, Art in Security' and 'Travelling light', n.paradoxa - international feminist art journal, Volume 17, 2006. She lives and works in London.


About Cherry Smyth

Cherry Smyth is a critic, curator and poet. She writes regularly for Modern PaintersArt MonthlyKaleidoscopeArt Review and Circa

Catalogue essays include 'Normapaths: the work of Jane and Louise Wilson', CHISENHALE Gallery, 1995; ‘Flown and Sealed: the Work of Orla Barry‘, TEMPLE BAR Gallery, Dublin, 2002; ‘Intimate Handling: the work of Dirk Braeckman’, A PRIOR, Brussels, 2002; ‘Cylindrical Music: The Work of Simon Hitchens’, CADOGAN CONTEMPORARY, 2003; ‘Gnaw at the Barrier: the work of Emma Woffenden and Ann Course’, FIRST SITE AND ANGLE ROW Galeries, 2004 and ‘No Respect’, PROJECT ARTS CENTRE, Dublin, 2004, ‘Private Emergencies’, on Salla Tykka for CHAPTER ARTS, Cardiff, 2006,
Behind the Light’, Elizabeth Magill at WILKINSON GALLERY, 2008, ‘Gathering Life’, Hannah Maybank for ARTSWAY, 2009, and ‘Radiant Vitality’, the work of Thomas Flechtner, for ‘Bloom’, LARS MULLER Publications, 2007.

She was a visiting critic at Braziers International Art Workshop and at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Castello, Spain. She was a visiting lecturer at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2005. She has given gallery talks at Tate Modern, the National Portrait Gallery, the Serpentine Gallery, Camden Arts Centre and the Kerlin Gallery.

She was the curator for Stay, a group show of 11 emerging artists at the Great Eastern Hotel, London, July, 2005 with Commissions East. She was a curatorial adviser for Axis' online showcase, Open Frequency, 2006.


Open Frequency keeps you in touch with new developments in contemporary art practice from across the UK. The artists are selected and profiled by leading curators, artists and writers, presenting the work of artists to watch out for over the coming year. Open Frequency represents a forward-looking glance today of the artists who will be setting the agenda tomorrow.