Mona Radziabari

Mona Radziabari was born in Tehran in 1983. Today she lives and works in Vienna. She completed her bachelor’s degree at the Handicrafts Department of Tehran University of Art in 2005. She came to Europe in 2014 and completed her master’s degree in Trans Arts – Transdisciplinary Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2018. Mona Radziabari has experienced the repression of the Iranian regime since her early childhood – as a person, as a woman, and later as an artist. There is much in her work that unmistakably indicates that the influence of politics is as much a part of her art as it is of her life.

In 2012, when Mona Radziabari was still living in Iran, she realized a photo project that should not have come about as such. After the suppression of the Green Revolution in 2009, Iran had changed and those in power tried to control life through strict restrictions. Photography was forbidden by the police in Tehran at the time. The artist does it anyway – with an old cardboard box that she converts into a pinhole camera. The results of the Pointless hole series are surreal photographs that convey an impression of how Mona Radziabari experiences her home city under the aegis of those in power: as “an alien place”, indeed, “another planet”.

When Mona Radziabari left her home country in 2014 to study in Vienna, another experience was added that left its mark on her life and artistic work: the experience of a migrant. Confronted with the realities of a new reality, she can only follow political events in her home country from afar. It was under this impression that she created the work In the memory of lost dreams (2016) in 2016. It is an assemblage of whitewashed objects and artifacts. The objects may be reminiscent of “lost dreams”, but in fact they embody those symptomatic “defense mechanisms used by the subconscious to manipulate, deny or distort reality in order to ward off feelings of anxiety and unacceptable impulses and to maintain one’s own self-schema”, as the artist explains. The perception and manipulation of such realities is also the subject of the group of works Who cares. In it, Mona Radziabari uses Iranian daily newspapers published between 2011 and 2015 as “image carriers”. She paints over the photos on the respective pages. She fundamentally questions the evidence of reporting, which is usually attested to by press or reportage photos. The artist replaces them with solipsistic miniatures that convey lost dreams and longings rather than referring to any kind of reality with news value.

During the first corona lockdown in spring 2020, she created a series of paintings whose title indicates how long it would take to walk from Vienna to Tehran: 33 days and 13 hours. At a time when freedom of movement is reduced to a minimum and her home country is inaccessible, Mona Radziabari clicks through city maps of Tehran on Google Maps. She captures digital map views and paints them on the canvas – as if, as an exile, she wanted to bridge the geographical distance one by one.

Compared to the map views, the paintings from the Less is enough series are even more abstract. But the impulse for the paintings is almost unbearably concrete, real, blatant. In view of the images circulating of the bloody suppression of the recent protests in her home country, these almost meditative, contemplative color field paintings seem like a self-imposed withdrawal. Or as the artist herself describes it: “I felt the weight of the immeasurable suffering particularly on my eyes and decided to turn my gaze to empty spaces in order to find peace.” Ralf Christofori