within the metamorphosis
within the metamorphosis is a performance directed by visual artist, Afruz Amighi, conceived in the wake of the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in Iran. It is an evocation of death as the ultimate conjurer of life and a summoning of possible new worlds. Through poetry, dance and sound, the audience is invited to step inside a place of transformation where hope, despair, heaven and hell live side by side.
Choreography and Dance - Leah Fournier, Amelia Koper Heintzelman
Musical Composition - Darius Jamal VanSluytman
Vocals - Jennifer Pyron
Full length performance
Artist Q&A
Invitations to Tremble
Management is pleased to present Invitations to Tremble, curated by Brooke Lynn McGowan, reflecting on the practice of eight artists and artists collectives and investigating the slippages between trauma and self-care, between death and reversal, between fear and bliss.
Comparative Hell: Arts of Asian Underworlds
Asia Society Museum presents Comparative Hell: Arts of Asian Underworlds, the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States to explore portrayals of hell across the Asian religious traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Islam.
Light Play
Light Play is an exhibition drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection that shows the influence and use of light in art.
In this exhibition, artists examine the many meanings of ‘light’ and ‘play’ through medium, expression, meaning, and form. Light Play brings together contemporary artists and works exploring the manipulation, effects, and emotions of light, including the double meaning of the word ‘light,’ by featuring works that are lively or humorous in subject matter.
Explore more than thirty works by artists like Afruz Amighi, Kumi Yamashita, and Harry Anderson, who incorporate light and shadows as a part of their process.
Here After
Hope for paradise has sparked the imagination of humankind across history and many religions. Here After is a group exhibition featuring artworks that delve into this imagination, exploring various religious or metaphysical positions, suppositions, or questions.
Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians
Drawn from the Mohammed Afkhami collection, “Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians” presents works by twenty-three artists from Iran and its global diaspora. Dating from 1998 to the present, many of these contemporary works have by now become iconic.
My House, My Tomb
Resembling a pair of delicate chandeliers dangling from the ceiling, My House, My Tomb is a sculptural diptych “drawn” with industrial materials, including chains and fiberglass, but the primary medium is light.
A Bridge Between You and Everything: An Exhibition of Iranian Women Artists
The Center for Human Rights in Iran is honored to announce an upcoming exhibition of 13 contemporary Iranian women artists in New York City, curated by the internationally acclaimed artist Shirin Neshat.
The show, A Bridge Between You and Everything features nearly 100 works—paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography and video—by both established and emerging artists, who began working after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. The exhibition is organized by the Center.
The Presence of Your Absence Is Everywhere
This exhibition presents recent sculptures and drawings by the critically acclaimed artist Afruz Amighi, who was born in Iran in 1974 and has lived in the United States since 1977. Her work is in the permanent collection of major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2009, she received the inaugural Jameel Prize, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s prestigious international award for contemporary art and design inspired by the Islamic tradition. Using light and dark as her primary medium and telling stories in shadows, she creates sculptures made of industrial materials commonly found on urban construction sites. When illuminated, the sculptures defy their humble origins and mimic the effect of more decadent luxury objects, such as chandeliers, jewelry, and Persian metalwork. Recently, art deco architecture, Native American headdresses, and nuclear missiles have entered her repertoire of sources, alongside the art of the Middle East, as the artist engages with her mixed Iranian American heritage and current political events. The exhibition will include the suspended sculpture My House, My Tomb, which explores myths about the Taj Mahal and has never been exhibited in the United States.
Echo's Chamber
Sophia Contemporary is pleased to announce Echo’s Chamber, the first solo exhibition of Iranian-American artist Afruz Amighi in the UK. The exhibition – which also marks Amighi’s first solo show with Sophia Contemporary following her successful inclusion in the gallery’s group show ‘Shifting Landscapes’ earlier this year – will feature nine new sculptures made from the artist’s signature combination of steel, chain, and mesh illuminated by light, along with eight drawings. Spurred by the continued struggle for women’s liberation as well as by the current sociopolitical climate in both the USA where she resides and in her native Middle East, Amighi’s new works explore ideas of femininity through a series of female archetypes from history as well as the artist’s personal experience.
No More Disguise
Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Iranian American artist Afruz Amighi, No More Disguise, from June 22nd to July 28th, 2017. “We are a country of civil war, and from the eternal divide, the ever present rift, lifting their heads and making themselves known, faces emerge.” Amighi continues, “I cover them with headdresses I have made, to protect them, to reveal them, to honor and ridicule them.” The Emperor, the Empress, the Fool, the Warrior, the Beheaded, the Unborn: in a series of six graphite and six sculptural wall reliefs, composed as headdresses, Amighi renders a procession of passion and derision, formally presenting the figure in her oeuvre for the first time in a poetical invocation of the masquerade of power, or what the artist calls, “heroes and villains ... emerging from our new social and political landscape.”
Mångata
Leila Heller Gallery Dubai is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Iranian-American artist Afruz Amighi, Mångata, on view from April 29th – June 15th. It is fitting that Amighi titled her upcoming exhibition with the Swedish word “Mångata”, a word that has no direct English translation. Instead it is a description of the glimmering, road-like reflection that the moon creates on the water - which acts as an invitation to consider how reflection and light create key experiences within this body of work. In this context, essential aspects of Amighi’s creative practice come to the fore. Her use of cast shadows direct what becomes illuminated with installations that allow for intimate experiences with the viewer. Innovative objects and shapes emerge from material that surpass their modest origins playing on the brilliance of what glistens when it gets touched by light.
Night Paintings
Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to present Night Paintings, a discrete installation of steel, shadow, and sound by Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based artist, Afruz Amighi on view from February 18th —March 26th, 2016. Composed of light and welded-steel, a diptych of two sculptural reliefs seeks to investigate the plural temporality of an architectonics of ritual and cultural memory.
Far From God
Iranian-American artist Afruz Amighi's work, Far From God was installed on the lawn in front of the Visitors Center. This work references Early Christian Architecture and spirituality.
We have been waiting for you to come. The preparations have been underway for some time. We have grown accustomed to the blare of horns, the bustle, the idea. From across the ocean your clear shadow stretches over our city, so far from god. And now your arrival is immanent.
Still I wonder how we will greet you. And what exactly it is that you will see. All the old idols have been undug. We have driven back time “before alphabets and numbers, the altar and the law.” The hum of work fills everything, along with our anticipation.
But after these years of great labor, will we find solace by your side? The paranoia, we sit with it and eat it in every grain. We carry on like this, making new idols. Even in our ungoverned hours, we are possessed by the spectre of you.
– Afruz Amighi