Haynes Riley interviews Nazafarin Lotfi

Ten questions from Haynes Riley for Nazafarin Lotfi regarding her exhibition Negative Capability.

1.
HR
Let’s begin with the drawings and the negative space: the angular white areas create stark shapes in each composition, in some ways like a bright surface in a darkening room, or a stark, spot-lit wall on the outside of a building at night. This imagery conjures notions of time: day and night; several cycles through light and dark. Do you see these in this way, as traversing the space of time?

NL
Movement unravels in time and in real life. In these drawings, I was exploring abstracting notions of movement in interior spaces within an open time frame. What you are referring to as a bright surface in a darkening room, or a spot-lit wall on the outside of a building at night, is right on. The negative space is the interior space where things happen. It’s nullified and acts like an opening or a passage which leads from the surface into depth. In Common Fragments, the geometric voids are actually the shape of the openings in these interiors. The rectangles are the windows and doors which are drawn from different perspectives.

2.
HR
I’m calling it the space of time as a way to differentiate the understood notions of time-experienced-in-measurements-of-numbers (seconds, minutes, hours). Are there ways that you delineate this too?

NL
I think about all the work, including these drawings, each one of them, as a container of time. I spend a long time making each work and the surfaces, textures, and images expose the touch. I am very interested in the weathering of the surfaces and the way that it applies to the body as proof of change, time, hardship, and stress. I also associate movement and experience with time.

What you call space of time reminds me of the way time and space are portrayed in the classic Persian miniatures I look at. I like these paintings because there are often no attempts to portray a three-dimensional world; no shadows, no perspective. The artist actually wants to show that these places are imaginary. But there are multiple planes in each composition, some in isometric projection, some parallel to the picture plane, and they suggest depth. The viewer’s eyes move from one plane to the next and therefore all around the image. The active experience of looking at these intimate images becomes something like an esoteric interpretation, which suggests an exploration of some sort of hidden meaning in the work.

3.
HR
The papier-mâché work is like the body’s memory of these spaces; a topical, material, textural extrapolation from the drawings. Is there a connection between the drawings and the papier-mâché works? Does one inform the other, and if so, how?

NL
Vanished Like Smoke was the first piece that I made for the show and it directly came from Malevich’s Black Square. The seed of the show is the Black Square and my relationship to it, and how it resonates with our current political time. The other two papier-mâché works came after the drawings and actually were inspired by the architectural spaces of the drawings.

The dialogue between experiencing the space from inside and outside was a common concept in all the work. Shifting place and changing perspective another. It is fascinating to be able to experience from inside the body and connect with the surroundings from there.

4.
HR
As well, the papier-mâché sculptural work feels like a static capturing of the experienced space of time that gets mapped in the drawings. They are like garments, hunkered down and covering the body — worn, waiting to be hung on hooks — that hint at the abstracted planes of the drawings.

NL
Perhaps they are the materialized experience of being inside the drawings. I move back and forth between a mental space and the physical manifestation of that. I like to give material to the most intuitive and subjective experiences one has with their surroundings. In the drawings and the wall-hanging papier-mâché pieces, I imagine a body against the walls or windows. A body who is navigating these places. I avoid representing a particular kind of space/place in the work and am interested in the space presenting itself as the viewer starts looking into the work.

5.
HR
Does it take a subject to be lost?

NL
Probably you have to be someone first before you let go of it. Getting lost requires letting go of the stability one has acquired by the construction of their identities. Losing that is winning all the senses back, working hard to re-create oneself.

6.
HR
I think the notion of uncertainty that arises from the show is powerful in that it signifies the release of control from the known; in doing so, giving the control to something else, maybe to an experience, to something experienced, to the yet-to-be-experienced. One can only see through the lens of their own experience unless they engage in radical empathy. Do you think your work has the potential to facilitate this condition?

NL
You put it in such a nice way. I hope my work does that. We live in an interesting time when there is so much uncertainty about the future, climate, politics, immigration… In such circumstances, we all need to be more imaginative.

Since I’ve become an immigrant and physically and emotionally embody two time zones, two languages, two cultures, two sets of very different families, I sense a certain amount of fluidity in me. Like a lot of people, I grew up in an environment based on an extreme binary thought system which took away freedom, imagination, and potential. I always wanted my work not to be that, and not to reinforce the same way of thinking and experiencing. A certain amount of openness allows for empathy.

7.
HR
I am experiencing uncertainty through the structure of this interview: ten questions first, and then ten answers to follow. I’m trying to expect a flow of the conversation but having only seen your work in the exhibition (which this exercise will become an extension of) and not knowing you in person, I can’t anticipate your answers or your initial reactions to these questions. And this feels like the condition that exists in your work and one in which you speak about in the interviews I’ve read.

NL
(unanswered)

8.
HR
So, a question would be, do you feel that uncertainty, that this negative capability is positive?

NL
It’s a hopeful place.

9.
HR
(unasked)

10.
HR
Perhaps it makes sense to end the conversation as we began, pointing to the emptiness, to the void. I’ve left the second to last question un-asked, a void in these ten questions and answers, perhaps as a hybrid space. Hybrid spaces, as you’ve mentioned before, are “spaces that open up conversation…that question the common reductionism of this versus that.” Do you think the misunderstanding that results from these ambiguities is important to resolve? That may not be clear, but perhaps the negative space is a place that holds it all together, those questions that go unasked and answers that form run-on sentences that keep the conversation from being reduced.

NL
That’s a great question. And maybe that is one of the reasons that we are having this conversation; to clear up some of the ambiguities that the work brings up.

Being misunderstood is not a good place to be, it’s a voiceless place. I talk about my work and write about my practice (more than I want or should) to give enough information to keep the conversation from being reduced. I know there is more interest in direct messages, didacticism, narratives, and representation now and I don’t want to blame social media for our generation’s short attention span, but I am not interested in making art that is understood immediately. And perhaps one reason is that my work is both personal and conceptual and comes from the awareness that I (my gender, race, nationality, history, and everything else that I embody) have been misunderstood, misrepresented, and marginalized historically.

I make work to find my place in the world not to change it and unfortunately, that place demonstrates many complexities, paradoxes, and nuances. I look for a moment of relatability in the slow process of experiencing a work of art that is not loudly and directly telling you what it is. Dealing with ambiguity is letting go of control and allowing things to happen and that can be empowering. I know that this approach can be interpreted as individualistic, but it doesn’t come from an entitled place. Rather it comes from a place of struggle, a constant battle for worth and space.

 

Haynes Riley is an artist, designer, and proprietor of  Good Weather, a gallery in North Little Rock, Arkansas.