Koushna Navabi engages with Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Myrrha, a mixed media sculptural installation, combined painting taking its name from another tragic heroine, punished for taking what could not be hers. In the tale, Myrrha seduces her father, invisible under night, and is turned into a myrrh tree when she attempts to escape her father’s wrath once he learns her identity. As with much of Navabi’s work, this piece does not only draw on the literary references but on larger cultural myths about Orientalism and gender. Like Myrrha, the female body of Navabi’s work is petrified, exposed, and represented as an insatiable void, punished for her immoral desire.

But the oil rig distributes the shame and responsibility of the scene. As Navabi has discussed, oil can represent the union of the East and West in a relationship of extraction. Ovid’s story, replete with misogynist and Orientalist tropes, positions Myrrh’s father as victim, despite him welcoming a young woman into his bed before learning who she was. In Navabi’s work, a mashup of masculine painting, feminine weaving, Persian carpet, and European sculpture traditions, no party is faultless. (...)


Stitched. Ordovas. (Catalogue) 2022

My dad, as a salesman for a machine parts company travelled for work extensively. Never to anywhere particularly exciting, but prosaic hotels and grey European cities were a constant scenery to much of his professional life. Recently, now retired, he mentioned that he found a particular moment during those trips fascinating. He spoke with slight nostalgia, but mostly relief as he described the few hours of the very end of the last day of a stretch away from home. His meetings were done, what sales could be made had been made. He’d had the hotel breakfast one last time, taken his suitcase down to reception and asked them to stow it away in the luggage room on checkout. Often with a few hours to his flight, he’d wander about whatever Mitteleuropean city was his venue that week. It was these hours that he remembered most he said, describing a feeling of discombobulation. He used phrases like “on the trip but the trip was over”, “there but already mentally elsewhere” and “in limbo”.

This conversation came back to me when thinking about the work of Koushna Navabi. My dad’s story is one that comes from a particular place of privilege (I recognise the phenomenon too, the art critic covers surprisingly similar ground to the machine parts salesman) being used to allude to a body of art that has at its centre a particularly vulnerable subject, the forced migration of the artist. Yet, I make it nonetheless, because Navabi’s work is less about the political or even biographical realities of her exile from Iran in 1978 – aged 16, the year of the country’s Black Friday massacre – nor her travel first to the US and eventual settlement in the UK, and more of the existential angst that might forever keep the migrant in the limbo of a trip that that is over but still being felt.

A line from the play Heauton Timorumenos by Terence, Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto rings through the work of Koushna Navabi. “I am human: I consider nothing human is alien to me” also comforted me in making my analogy. For this is not art about immigration, or a particular culture, to be only fully understood by the immigrant, or through that culture, there is a universality to it that speaks to human fears the globe over. Yet, of course, there is a complexity to the work that belies the Roman maxim. For all the homeliness in Navabi’s use of craft technique, there is a sense of dreadful alienation that hangs over so much of her practice. A constant rub in her work between the familiar and domestic, and the violent and the strange.

In Untitled (Tree Trunk) (2017), a female form, complete but for truncated limbs and a gaping hole where the figure’s heart might be, has been hewn from a single piece of wood and is suspended with metal wire from the gallery ceiling. It is a macabre image: dismembered and left to hang, a body infused with violence. On the bottom half of the figure the surface of the wood remains rough, the bark missing in parts; yet the woman’s upper body and head is covered in Persian kilim bar an opening for a mouth which appears as if mid scream. To an extent the presence of the textile softens the image – a reference to Iran certainly, a reminder of ‘home’ – but with the face obscured it appears less celebratory and more a skin that the body is forced to wear, a reminder perhaps that however comfortable the migrant might be in their newfound country, they are frequently forced to wear the uniform of the outsider. Conversely the naked lower body suggests vulnerability: the migrant in strange lands, stripped of their moorings. There is a trauma to this othering – and it is an inescapable irony that the western critic writing on the Iranian artist’s work will always do it with half an eye to biography and nationality – but in the foregrounding of nature, the work ultimately seeks to escape the prism (prison) of self-reflection to speak instead to a universal essence and earthly commonality. The wire is attached at the navel like an umbilical cord, a reminder of birth (or rebirth) within the death: the comforts of life, always foreshadowing the terror of death.

The artist has often utilised a sense of horror: Crows, a largescale sculpture from 2006 featured the taxidermy birds given long trailing textile tails that hung down from a bare tree; Jen (Ogre), 2001, spoke to dual identities in its fusion of the taxidermy legs of a llama with two stuffed textile humanoid torsos; a series of early works from the mid-1990s features stuffed textile renderings of human organs. Yet the material sits uncomfortably with the forms, a conjuring of unheimlich, of the home, but strange to it.

On the surface, Navabi’s subject in Biswkeet-e Madar (Mother Biscuit), is a nostalgic one: a popular brand of Iranian biscuits are rendered oversized. The tray a meticulously stitched tapestry stretched over a wooden box frame, with the edible contents, reproduced in rough, crumbling-looking, concrete. There should be a Warholian joy to the familiar enlarged; but this work is monstrous in a way. Though the craftwork beautiful, and the image of a woman nurturing her baby on the front, sweet; the work unpacks a fraught history. The biscuits predate the Iranian revolution: before 1978 the woman’s head was uncovered. Early television adverts (you can find them on YouTube) show a wholesomely glamour nuclear family enjoying the snack. Now woman wears a blue headscarf, a stand-in for the country’s isolation. Nonetheless, while Biwkeet-e Madar enjoys one explicitly historiographic reading, this is not work about Iran. The biscuits are scattered around the gallery as if spilt, or propped against the walls, like tombstones. Death haunts here too. The work charts a separation from a mother culture – and nods to the artist’s own biography – but more than that it speaks of estrangement as being a fundamental force of life, as baby becomes adult, and adult passes on. Navabi’s work – complex, packed with dualities, binaries, and conflicts – asks questions of settlement and alienation, of the impossibility of stability; the joy, the trauma, of the journey; of being here, but being elsewhere.

The Spark is You, Venice and London. (catalogue). 2019