The Brooklyn Rail

Maryam Taghavi’s installations, paintings, and institutional interventions appear meditative, tranquil on jewel-toned surfaces, yet they are charged with a consciousness that embraces the impossibility of fully understanding the mysteries between spiritual and ordinary worlds. Testing our receptivity to the in-between states of knowing and not knowing, Taghavi plots and carves sensual impressions through stretched and collapsed airbrush paintings on crepe de chine, carved inscriptions, wood, metal, and stone, creating an complex experience of surface, gravity, weight/lessness. Curated by Bana Kattan (the Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the MCA Chicago), Taghavi’s first institutional solo exhibition, Nothing Is, is the twenty-first edition of Chicago Works. Kattan and Taghavi work in solidarity, criss crossing international boundaries to make Persian contemporary art and the symbolism of Sufi and Islamic thought legible to the city’s viewing publics.

Transforming the walls of the Turner Gallery, Kattan and Taghavi invite wanderers into an angular, sage green entryway. Modeled on Persian architecture, we are enfolded into the artist’s ritual in Hashti (2023) as she invites viewers’ eyes to travel through gallery walls. Noghte-shaped peepholes journey the diacritic mark into mirrored chambers, throwing calligraphic elements into kaleidoscopic ecstasy. Reminiscent of āynāh-kāri, Pentagonal View and Quadrilateral View (both 2023) strip the noghte of its role as linguistic marker or geometric measure, compelling us to consider what mysteries lie in the fourth dimension with an illuminated dot as our only wayfinder.

Reflecting meditations in a league of artists such as Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Mehmet Günyeli, and Zarina Hashmi, Taghavi’s meta geometries are an encounter with the transcendent qualities of the Persian calligraphic tradition. By revealing layers of meaning through materials, techniques and the location of the body, she points to a ceremonial syntax found in art from the East where colors, linguistic elements, and numbers are obscured, accessible only to those whose eyes come seeking.

Born in Tehran and living in Canada and the US, Taghavi draws from her experience of diaspora, secularizing markers of piety to reconstruct memories of a culture now “out of reach.” In earlier works such as Reverse Archaeology (2017), Fate of War (2018), and Talismanic Arrangements (2021), Taghavi set out to puncture the surface; she carved into and through two dimensional planes, calculating geometric axioms to summon protective symbols. Attempting to overthrow collective fears and emotional ruptures associated with the immigrant and diasporic condition and feeling through three dimensional space, Taghavi began to reinterpret formal value systems, abstracting geometric motifs through repetition, to create atmospheric interpretations. Approaching the center of the gallery, a spotlit limestone sculpture, Heechi (2023) sits mounted on the floor at knee-height.

Revolution has been a constant in the context of Iran. The inarticulable pain of witnessing Western intervention and political warfare is not new to the displaced Iranian citizenry. Responding to an unfinished history of Iranian modernity, Taghavi interjects neo-modernist sculptor Parviz Tanavoli’s Heech (1972). Tanavoli’s publicized series employs the alphabets “he” “ye” and “che” to translate as “heech.” Taghavi adds a “y”, transforming “heech” to “heechi,” shifting the weight of Tanavoli’s spiritual sense of “nothingness” (or cosmic emptiness from which the universe arises) to a profound, shared sense of earthly disappointment expressed in Heechi: nothing. As the world witnesses Iran’s Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (Women, Life, Freedom) revolution through leaked images on social media, we can read Taghavi’s indication of despair as a worn response to the historic mistreatment of Kurdish, Baloch, and Azeri women, among other minoritized groups, pointing out that even in “nothingness” lives a desire to be remembered, to be free.

Dawn (Horizon Series) (2023) transposes modulating fields of airbrushed lavender-pink yellows against greenish-blues wrought from the artist’s ritual walks to Lake Michigan at dawn. Attuned to the vivid phenomenon of sunrise over the water, Taghavi captures the sensuous adjustment of pupils as she notes the horizon in noghte. Disturbing the Sufist goal of “Oneness” with the divine—the source of all illumination—Taghavi’s horizon splits, spilling noghte across five, 80 by 42-inch panels hung from the ceiling. Overhead, heavy metallic apparati create ripples that curl the bottom edges of crepe de chine, breaking a horizontal read of a horizon line. Counting noghte groupings, Taghavi moves her splintered horizon up, down, and across, juxtaposing craftsmanship of the hand with the flawed tendencies of holistic perception. The viewer’s body requires an “optimal distance” where light profuses fields of color. “We perceive an edge where sky meets water, but they never really do,” she explains. “It’s an act of meaning-making performed by our minds.”

Leaning into clairvoyance as artistic method, Taghavi most interestingly places two prismatic portals, one assembled and one unfolded highly polished stainless steel sheet at diagonal corners of the gallery. Unfolded Hexagon (2023) refracts atmospheric light, throwing two shimmering spectral fan-shaped reflections onto forest green gallery walls. To the left, a miniature calligraphic scripture devoid of noghte, drawn by Parisa Shafiei in the style of Yadollah Kabuli, hangs on a cream wall. Poetic, illusory, and animated with ethereal presences, Nothing Is inspires the unseasoned eye to witness what might become visible through a non-Western worldview, or to quote Jalal al-Din Rumi, “the light of the eye is produced, by the light of the heart.”