Image: Freitag (Friday), photographic work, 2003.

Ornament and Crime: Parastou Forouhar

FEBRUARY 8-MARCH 10 

Curated by Joanna Inglot, chair and associate professor of the Art and Art History Department

Opening reception on Friday, February 8 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Artist’s talk on Monday, February 11 at 5 p.m., Hewitt Hall, Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center

Iranian-born, internationally known artist, Parastou Forouhar, will present a solo exhibition at Macalester’s Law Warschaw Gallery.  The exhibition, “Ornament and Crime,” opens Fri., Feb. 8 and is curated by Joanna Inglot, chair and associate professor of Macalester’s Art and Art History department.

The exhibition will feature photographs, digital drawings, balloons, flip-books, and other designed elements that reflect on the social and political power in contemporary Iran, and on Forouhar’s personal trauma and violence that has touched her own life, such as when her parents (prominent intellectuals and political activists in Iran) were assassinated in 1998. 

 Parastou Forouhar was born in Tehran in 1962. She studied art at the University of Tehran from 1984 to 1990 and continued her studies at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (High School for Design) in Offenbach am Main, Germany. She currently resides in Frankfurt.

 Forouhar has had various solo exhibitions throughout the world. They include Blind Spot, Stavanger Cultural Centre, Norway, and Golestan Art Gallery, Tehran (banned by the Iranian authorities), 2001; A Thousand and One Days, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2003; Just a Minute, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome, 2007; He Kills Me, He Kills Me Not, Verso Arte Contemporanea, Turin, 2010; Parastou Forouhar, Leighton House Museum, London, 2010; Parastou Forouhar, RH Gallery, New York, 2010–11; and Written Room, Fondazione Merz, Turin, 2011. 

Forouhar’s art has also been presented in many important group exhibitions including Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, 2007; and The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society at the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art, 2012.