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DETAILS
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2003 50” x 34”
Coffee stains, saffron, acrylic, glitter, gravel, and modeling paste on paper
Artist’s Collection, New York
Work created at the Jentel Artist Residency Program, Wyoming.
Cat. na3
Exile of the Farrahs uses the same symbolic language as Fall, though a focus on one single theme turns it much less formally and ichnographically complex. Under the worried eye of puzzled Casper, the Yellow Brick Road now runs in the opposite direction: from the remote Emerald City, through the vacant and haunted ancienne régime farmhouse, outwards. Two of these veiled, vile phalli figures hurl a group of obedient, even cooperating (notice red slippers) Farrahs into that horrible land of coffee rings, where they are now subject to sexual and physical abuse. To me, the title refers not to the actual exile Iranian women, but to the women who stayed behind, who even took part in the revolution—mind again their symbolic identity as Munchkins; they crowned phallic Dorothy! These are the women who bore the consequences, the true victims of that traumatic power shift, and the exile Ahkami mentions is, in my opinion, indeed the exile of a Farrah—an inner Farrah—all that which is whimsical, light and feminine in a woman. This loss is beautifully echoed in the vertical water stains, which in my eye bear the pathetic air of mournful tears on a make-up covered face. —NT
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