‘The Gifts’, part of the shape of things
(new art by Rosa Nguyen and Alinah Azadeh )

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, UK., 6 February - 18 April 2010
Curated by Julia Carver

In  September 2009, Alinah Azadeh invited the public to make donations of personal objects which ‘had outlived their emotional shelf-life’. As part of the process she asked the givers to record the personal meaning or association the objects had for them. Azadeh is interested in how context can affect the meaning of objects and in subverting ideas around the acquistion of specialist objects within museum culture.

She initiated the project with a gift of 99 objects of her own, including items belonging to her mother, who had died in the Asian tsunami of 2004. Her aim was to gather a total of 999 objects, nine being a significant number in many ways. In numerology nine represents balance, perfection and closure: the multiples of the nine times table always return to nine when added together, eg 9 x 7 = 63, 6 + 3 = 9. In Islam, God is said to have 99 names known to humans.

Sometimes working with the givers, (450 people participated in ‘wrapping rituals’ ) but mainly on her own, Azadeh wrapped the gifted objects in richly coloured fabrics and bound them in Sari yarn to transform them into her installation, using a colour palette inspired by Burmese, Turkish and Persian textiles. She then hung her 99 objects in a spiral from the gallery ceiling, topped and tailed by two circular mirrors to create an infinity effect, while, nearby, the 900 gifted objects were suspended to resemble a Persian carpet-come-tsunami wave. Though the objects were utterly transformed, she also kept something of their original meaning, by displaying the texts people wrote with their donations in a kind of public record on the gallery wall behind the suspended objects.

The Gifts was shown with Mother Tongue a sculpture made from rice-cookers belonging to the artist’s mother, which she wrapped and bound as a starting point to the collection. On the wrapping is written a poem, ‘Come, Come my Beloved’ by Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi. This poem was turned into a song by Iranian singer Bijan Bijani and the cassette recording was a gift to Azadeh from her Mother when she was a teenager. The poem is written in Farsi, in romanised Farsi, and English – the three languages  - tongues - spoken by the artist, her Iranian mother and her British-born daughter.

See Photo Gallery for images of the work.            
See Artist's Talking for Azadeh’s blog on this project.           
See Press /publications for media-related to this project.

The shape of things, is a national project offering bursaries for artists to create new work for exhibition at four venues.. See www.shapeofthings.org.uk for more details.

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