gestern war ich so müde dass ich den tee gegessen habe

In the three-part project Das Theater in jede*m von uns (The theater in each one of us), 17.02 - 30.06.2023, Kunstverein Arnsberg explores and investigates how processes and spaces of theater are given a form in visual art and in our everyday life. The series begins with the solo exhibition of Farkhondeh Shahroudi "gestern war ich so müde dass ich den tee gegessen habe (yesterday I was so tired that I ate the tea)": a sculptural fabric of poetic, social and political texture. Farkhondeh Shahroudi‘s artworks are drawn from the intertwined relationships between writing and image, between bodies and narration. Inspired by the poetry and memories of Iran and her everyday life in Germany, her works relate to verbal language and speechlessness. They evoke the unspoken. Her work addresses translocated movements of people who are at the mercy of others, uprooted or dislocated, moving between places and worlds as if in a play. Many figures in Shahroudi‘s work are reminiscent of traditional Iranian theater, “Ta‘ziyeh,” where actors, spectators, and animals blur into a single entity on the street. In this way, images, bodies, and narratives are transformed through her handwriting, through sewing and weaving with different materials, into a synthetic universe that oscillates between social and asocial, political and private, public and intimate, between the inside and the outside, between language and illegibility. gestern war ich so müde dass ich den tee gegessen habe is a solo exhibition that dares to look the shadows of everyday life in the eye. According to psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, a shadow is the sum of all the dark and especially repressed feelings that are hidden inside us. Shadows are all that we do not want to be, but at the same time often are. Shadows develop in every human being, starting already in childhood. The meaning of shadows differs depending on the culture in which one grows up. It belongs to life, just as light belongs to the day and darkness to the night. The eschatology of later Zoroastrianism, which originated in Western Iran, contains the widespread idea that humans cast no shadow when they arrive in the afterlife. For Farkhondeh Shahroudi, the carpet represents the ideal space, corresponding to an ancient symbolism, and in its completed coherence it assimilates in itself a part of paradise. In her sculptures and installations, these carpets evolve into mobile gardens, into heterotopic spaces: they have a different kind of spatiality that on the one hand releases the imagination and on the other gives form to that feeling of Not Belonging that is characteristic of the artist in exile. The exhibition at Kunstverein Arnsberg combines paintings, objects and photography from the artist‘s earlier creation, as well as newly conceived installations and drawings. Most of the works are exhibited for the first time and shown in an exhibition choreography that is based on storytelling and invites the audience to immerse into the multilayered inner landscapes of Farkhondeh Shahroudi‘s work. In the course of the exhibition Shahroudi will present a performance in public space. In “sang zani” (= knocking stones), the audience and the city residents will be invited to knock two stones on top of each other to predefined rhythms. This sound procession is performed by Shahroudi herself, dressed in the performative costume “of weeping trees” made from rubber tires. “sang zani” is a performative adaptation of the Shiite mourning ceremony “daste gardani” and the tradition of the Iranian theater “ta‘ziyeh”, where people are gathered to complain and mourn about injustices. The performance will be performed at the finissage on 16 April 2023. Farkhondeh Shahroudi (*1962, Tehran / Iran) lives and works in Berlin. She was awarded the Hannah Höch Förderpreis in 2022. Her recent solo and group exhibitions include “A Different Now is Close Enough to Exhale on You,” Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2022), “Max Beckmann Was Not Here,” Kupferstichkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin (2022), “Ich Habe Knast,” Spittelmarkt, Berlin, Speaking to Ancestors (2022), “Force Times Distance,” Sonsbeek, Arnhem, Netherlands (2021); “The Relative Naive,” Weisser Elefant Gallery, Berlin (2019); “Out Now! Art in Public Space,” Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, Berlin (2018); “Whose Land Have I Lit on Now? Reflections on the Concepts of Hospitality: Invocation II,” SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2018) and “Deep Nation,” Kreuzberg Pavillon, Berlin Das Theater in jede*m von uns (The theater in each one of us) is funded by Stiftung Kunstfonds as part of the NEUSTART KULTUR program. The Kunstverein Arnsberg is supported by the city of Arnsberg, Brauerei C. & A. Veltins and Sparkasse Arnsberg-Sundern. For press inquiries please send an e-mail to: [email protected]