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TITLE

YEAR

LOCATION

MEDIUM

TYPE

The Unseen Realm Of The Feminine Mystic - Part 1

2023 - 2025

TBC

water, light, kinetic 

Installation, sculpture

The Unseen Realm Of The Feminine Mystic - Part 1

Work in Progress : 2023 - 2025 

STAGE

  •  Concept development ready to progress into research, investigation, and community engagement

CURRENT PROJECT ENGAGEMENT AND SUPPORT 

  • Dr. Milad Milani (Academic mentorship)  - Iranian-Australian lecturer, author and thought-leader at Western Sydney University. 

  • Nader Yeganeh and Roya Yeganeh (Cultural mentorship) - My mother and father are key ongoing cultural mentors in my arts practice.

  • Iranian-Australian Community - engagement of members of both my immediate family and extended community are a critical aspect of this project from which I draw family archives, narratives and lived experiences into the research.

  • Kevin Murry (VP World Craft Council-Australia and Managing Editor of Garland Magazine) - The World Craft Council (WCC) is keenly interested to support my practice and aspirations to share cultural stories with the broader Australian community. I have received confirmation of their intentions to publish potential catalogue essays and supporting imagery on their online platforms.

CONCEPT

 ‘The Unseen Realm of the Feminine Mystic’

My proposed project explores the reclamation of Iranian female spiritual identity.

The religions of the ancients were once attuned to the sacred feminine.  However, with the rise of monotheistic faiths, the divine feminine has been brought increasingly under scrutiny until utterly relegated to the esoteric and the occult within many cultures, including in contemporary Iran.

 

Our cultural and spiritual landscape is rooted in a masculine-spiritual realm, where men make decisions regarding places of worship, ceremony, and ritual. In contrast, spaces where women may shape the spiritual are dangerous, forcing our cultural experience and authority permanently into the periphery.

INQUIRY 

My inquiry aims to:

  • Challenge the one-dimensional nature of religion and spirituality shaped through the masculine lens in Iran, considering the historic impacts on female identity

  • Investigate where the Divine Feminine can be observed, exploring history, architecture, and ceremony.

  • Create work drawing on forces and faith systems dedicated to the Divine Feminine.

  • Support women in my community by offering new perspectives on Iranian female identity, autonomy and value.

  • Reposition complex, sensitive concepts into accessible, visible and welcoming learning public experiences.

  • Create a large-scale kinetic sculpture that becomes a living entity influenced by public interaction:

    • Incorporates water, light, and sound;

    • Explores sacred semiotics, alongside sound and light-scapes, creating a metaphysical experience of the Divine;

    • Transcends geographic and gender boundaries through ancestral knowledge.

As an Iranian woman, artist, and refugee living in the diaspora, I am in a unique position to safely bring this project to life.

OUTCOMES

In this project, I create a sacred and ceremonial space, drawing on Sufism. Proposing an exploration of other-worldly forces and faith systems my ancestors once dedicated to the feminine mystic. Such spaces, where women are empowered to shape spiritual places of ritual are rare in Iran.   

This work reappropriates and reinterprets the spaces of the masculine-spiritual using ancestral knowledge through a contemporary female lens.  

 

Having previously worked with textiles, poetry, photography and 2D materials, this project is my first large-scale kinetic sculpture and pushes my practice towards my artistic and professional aspirations. Namely, drawing on my expertise as a trained engineer to create large-scale, complex and dynamic sculptures and installations.

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