Parastou Forouhar - Deadlines

Parastou Forouhar’s work reflects the encounter between Orient and Occident, between crisis area and comfort zone, between coercive order and cultural freedom.

Born in Tehran in 1962, the artist first started her art education in Iran and completed it in Germany, where she now lives and works. In this process she developed a work in which the beauty of ornamentation is combined with content critical of a system that reflects her personal experiences under the tyranny of the Mullah regime and, at the same time, makes a universal claim. Thus murder and torture appear as recurring motifs in Forouhar’s digital drawings and wall installations. In her most recent photographic works, it is the ambivalent attitude towards the chador as an aesthetic garment on the one hand and as a sign of the oppression of Muslim women on the other which the artist expresses. With this pictorial world developed in a European, cosmopolitan context, she occupies walls and entire rooms that capture us physically. In doing so, she expects us to leave the comfort zone of distanced observation in order to immerse ourselves in a world whose cruelty lies hidden precisely in the aesthetics and order of the ornament.