Farah Ossouli

This book provides insights on Farah Ossouli's artistic pursuits with miniature painting, explaining the historical background of Iranian Contemporary art and the challenges of contemporary image-making in the new political and social climate.

Farah Ossouli (born in 1953 in Zandschan, lives and works in Tehran) has explored innovative approaches to the medium of painting, most commonly through juxtaposition of images and texts that scrutinise preconceptions about gender and race while undermining collective assumptions in post-revolutionary Iran.

A hallmark of her paintings are exceptionally fine miniatures; her subjects are figurative but nevertheless not easily deciphered. Even though titles can identify what is portrayed, they often only hint at a possible interpretation of the picture. Though most of her works have a private character, Ossouli refers to historical events and occurrences with collective memory internationally, which still disturbs to this day. Ossouli can interpret history through an artwork, since the aesthetics of representation create a challenge to the ethics of what is represented. The aesthetic quality of the paintings is what first allows the viewers to address his content. The dissolution of subjectivity and its rearticulation in miniature compositions is a major trope.

Early on, Ossouli began to use mirrors to facilitate this process—as myth and metaphor doubling and redoubling a fragmented vision—returning the viewer to that moment of ego formation described by Jacques Lacan as the mirror stage. Farah Ossouli's paintings, gouaches, conceptual miniature works, drawings, artist books, and texts since the mid-1970s have been characterised by a keen awareness of how the conditio humana is a product of its representation in mass media. She has developed a unique aesthetic practice committed to a metaphorical and feminist narration.

For more than four decades, Ossouli has delved into the violent peripheries of a society mediated by images, in genuine compositions whose fine surfaces contain an unsettling visual poetics, political allure, and hope. Her works are monumental sites of confrontation with ideologies that manipulate and often obliterate the individual. This corporal trauma is expressed in an almost documentary realism with the elements of classical Persian Miniature Paintings that present little more than the bare facts. It is also reflected in every aspect of composition, from the projection of contemporary political issues and the removal of entire sections in the narration, to the unnerving collapse of the figure with the space it occupies.