ISCP announces a presentation of work by French/Iranian artist, Ghazel, a 2001 ISCP alumna. Mismappings is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States, and includes recent Marée Noire and Dyslexia drawings, a video triptych from the Me series, and a new Road Movie performance that deals with issues of immigration and borders and that took place during the opening reception.

Mismappings focuses on issues of migration, exile, transnational identities, expulsion, discrimination and displacement. Ghazel’s work addresses the political aspects of representation, which relate closely to her personal history. Since leaving Iran during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, she has navigated between Tehran and Paris for over thirty years.

Interested in radical cartography—an activist approach to mapping—Ghazel’s Marée Noire and Dyslexia works use ink and pen to erase the national borders indicated on Iranian-produced world maps. Clear and direct, more than twenty of these works on paper are shown in the exhibition. In gestural marks, the artist covers the national flags on the maps with black ink, and incorporates drawings of tree roots, suitcases and houses, illustrating the uprootedness of many people caused by political and social forces. In another video work in the exhibition, the artist documents a performance she made in a domestic space, where she folds and throws 51 paper airplanes made from world maps. Her mechanical and repetitive folding is shown in real-time, and a pile of paper planes gradually accumulates in the room.

Read the entire curatorial text here.