La relique est la première forme d’exposition
Successivement, elle co-créer La Maison Auriolles en 2018 à Bias (sud-ouest de la France), lieu de recherche, de rencontres et d’inventions poétiques.
Aurélia Zahedi maquille la mort, la déguise pour la donner en spectacle. Elle est dans une quête incessante de sa beauté qu’elle met en avant par des artifices. Ses installations/sculptures qu’elle définit comme « pièges à séduction » laissent place à des memento mori.
Dans cette quête incessante elle multiplie ses voyages à Jéricho (Palestine). Ainsi, elle convoque un certain nombre dematières et de langages pour réinventer ce végétal poétique, qui dès lors, frôle des questions complexes de croyances et d’incertitudes. En 2018, elle obtient le Prix Nopoto pour La Rose de Jéricho puis en 2021, elle reçoit la bourse Fanak Fund pour la mobilité des artistes au Moyen-Orient, et la bourse Ekphr@sis de l’ADAGP.
En 2024, l’Institut des Cultures d’Islam à Paris expose une monographie de son travail sur la Rose de Jéricho.
Mettre en lumière
Après ma première nuit à Maison Auriolles, un centre de recherche co-fondé en 2018 par l’artiste Aurélia Zahedi, j’ai trouvé un mot sur la table de la cuisine écrit sur papier rose : « Je suis allée jouer de l’orgue. De retour à 9h30. » Comme Zahedi m’avait vanté l’énergie vitale du Lot, rivière accessible par un
petit chemin depuis la propriété ancienne qui accueille le centre, j’avais décidé d’y plonger. Plus tard dans son atelier, avec une tasse de verveine de son jardin dans les mains, Zahedi m’a expliqué que pratiquer l’orgue dans les églises environnantes, dont elle détient les clefs, c’est ça son petit déjeuner. Elle est attirée par cet instrument auquel on ne peut jouer qu’après une ascension à l’intérieur des nefs de pierre et par sa musique « qui accompagne les morts. » Parcourant les claviers avec ses mains et ses pieds, elle voit s’ouvrir les portes de son cerveau.
lumière », à la manière de Jean-Henri Fabre. Elle se réfère parfois au naturaliste, philosophe et poète du 19e siècle, connu pour son travail méticuleux associé à une grande liberté d’interprétation, comme par exemple sur certains anthropoïdes comme le scarabée sacré. Inspirée par son attention, sa discipline du regard et sa capacité d’observer et de dépeindre, Zahedi dit « c’est ça être artiste : raconter une histoire ». Dans ses œuvres comme Madame le Sanglier (2015) où un crâne de l’animal est posé sur une colonne habillée en tissu rouge scintillant ou alors dans Danse macabre (2014) où une branche d’arbre morte est ornée avec des carcasses de pigeons, nous voyons l’artiste créer des personnages pour ses contes fantastiques.
BRINGING TO LIGHT
Last September, in order to prepare my article for the Quotidien de l'Art, Aurélia Zahedi invited me to spend a few days in her current home, a house in a small village about an hour from Agen. In these times of confinement and constraints, my stay was to remind me just how important the physical experience of an encounter is, and in my case, how necessary it is to understanding an artist's work.
After my first night at Maison Auriolles, a research centre co-founded in 2018 by artist Aurélia Zahedi, I found a note on the kitchen table written on pink paper: "Went to play the organ. Back at 9.30am." As Zahedi had extolled the vital energy of the Lot, a river accessible by a
property that houses the centre, I decided to take the plunge. Later in her studio, with a cup of verbena from her garden in her hands, Zahedi explained to me that playing the organ in the surrounding churches, to which she holds the keys, is her breakfast. She is attracted by this instrument, which can only be played after climbing inside the stone naves, and by its music "which accompanies the dead". Using her hands and feet to navigate the keyboards, she sees the doors to her brain opening.
It is essential for artists to have a quality critical text on their work. The Ekphrasis grants, launched by ADAGP in association with AICA France and Quotidien de l'Art, are designed to encourage this type of writing by putting 10 artists in touch with as many critics. The texts of the 10 winners of this second edition (each awarded €2,000, covering the writing of the text and its translation) are published throughout the year in Le Quotidien de l'Art, at the rate of one per month. In this tenth issue, Lillian Davies looks at the work of Aurélia Zahedi.
Zahedi grew up in central France. She studied visual arts in Avignon and then at Villa Arson, where her final project was a still life installation, Untitled (2012). On the immaculate lawn of the institution lay a dead goat attached to helium-filled balloons in a palette of brilliant pinks, oranges and greens. Although Zahedi doesn't see himself as a painter, his artistic approach is based on a pictorial framework, with the canvas and its challenges of light most often as the object.
To manipulate, even 'burn the light', Zahedi began using sequins back in 2013 with his installation Untitled, as part of the inaugural exhibition at Galerie Eva Vautier in Nice. Fish, presumably sea bass, changed every day and placed on a sea of silver glitter spread out on the floor. "I use sequins to make up for something that's difficult to look at," she explains, justifying her appropriation of a material that is as childlike as it is jubilant, for Paysages Désenchantés (2015). Zahedi applies it like paint to the canvases in this series. In each work, she depicts a dead animal with a tragic beauty that recalls the dramatic register of Angélica Liddell's productions. Almost hidden and embellished by a complex and dazzling composition, the shape of the animal melts into a feast of colours and reflections.
At the end of 2021, in a room at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, amid works by Caravaggio and Rubens, Zahedi presented Tapis de fleurs (2013), an accumulation of silk or plastic flowers in faded colours, found in cemetery dustbins. The work adapts to the dimensions of the exhibition space. Increasingly concerned with context, Zahedi says she wants to exhibit in places of worship "where the sacred is already present." "The relic is the first form of exhibition," she asserts. In Nancy, as in Avignon, in the Church of the Célestins, her work "is surrounded by icons, the Virgin is not far away".
In her work with carrion, whether found in the forest or donated by friends or villagers, Zahedi defines her artistic gesture by "bringing it to light", in the manner of Jean-Henri Fabre. She sometimes refers to the 19th-century naturalist, philosopher and poet, known for his meticulous work combined with great freedom of interpretation, as in the case of certain anthropoids such as the sacred beetle. Inspired by his attention to detail, his discipline of gaze and his ability to observe and depict, Zahedi says "that's what being an artist is all about: telling a story".
In works such as Madame le Sanglier (2015), in which an animal skull is placed on a column dressed in glittering red fabric, or Danse macabre (2014), in which a dead tree branch is adorned with pigeon carcasses, we see the artist creating characters for her fantastical tales.
It is the Rose of Jericho that flourishes at the heart of Zahedi's work, a plant of 'modest beauty', nomadic and almost immortal, surrounded by legends. Some say it only flowers where the Virgin's feet have touched the ground. But the Virgin has probably never been to Jericho. With the support of the Fanak Fund, Zahedi is currently preparing a trip to Palestine where she will work with Bedouins to imagine the route the Virgin Mary might have taken if she had passed through this city, which was part of the Roman Empire, then the Umayyad Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire, and which is now divided by the conflicts of the West Bank. In preparation for this site-specific work, Zahedi is looking for images of the Virgin Mary's feet during her flight to Egypt. She wants to engrave her imaginary footprint on stones in the desert and then create a map of her path in French and Arabic. In Repos de la Sainte Famille by Orazio Gentileschi (1625-1650), the Virgin Mary's bare foot is visible and surprisingly large. In this composition, as the exhausted Joseph lies on their modest luggage, she has the strength to nurse the sacred child.
A propos dʼAurélia ZAHEDI,
« On entre dans une installation dʼAurélia Zahedi comme dans LʼEscarpolette de Fragonard, et on en ressort comme des caprices de Goya… « Je tiens à une première approche de séduction, provoquée par le merveilleux dans lʼimage, qui laisse place à une plus sombre amertume » reconnaît-elle. De loin tout nʼest que fleurs, danse, paillettes, mais de près ce sont des cadavres dʼanimaux et les souvenirs funéraires qui sautent à la gorge. Aurélia Zahedi revendique crânement la pratique artistique comme fabrique dʼillusions, de pièges à sentiments, mais à lʼapproche ses compositions cèdent la place à des décompositions, avatars contemporains des natures mortes ou des vanités dans La société du spectacle.
Tout ce qui, dans la peinture ancienne, chatoyait ou étincelait les compositions florales, le vernis, les flancs argentés de poissons à écailles, est étalé là, bien réel, sous nos yeux, sous notre nez aussi, putride, graisseux… Son Tapis de fleurs (2012) mêle vraies et fausses fleurs, mais toutes ont été ramassées au cimetière, et empestent soit la vieille poussière, soit le pourri. Idem pour sa gracile Danse macabre (2013) : foin dʼinsouciants volatiles sur la branche, car lʼarbre et les pigeons sont pareillement morts, et même momifiés. Le monde que nous promet Aurélia Zahedi est le nôtre, un monde en putréfaction qui se maquille outrageusement comme une courtisane fanée, mais ne parvient pas à dissimuler les os qui percent sous sa joue car elle nʼest plus quʼun squelette. »
texte de Stéphane Corréard, critique d’art, directeur du salon Galeristes, ancien directeur du Salon de Montrouge à Paris.
One enters Aurélia Zahediʼs installation as if one were entering Fragonardʼs « LʼEscarpolette », and one exits them as if exiting Goyaʼs « Caprices »… « I like to have a seductive first approach, which comes from the marvelous aspect of the image, before giving way to a darker bitterness », she admits. Seen from afar there are flowers, dance, glitter, but seen up close corpses of animals and funerary memories jump out at us. Aurélia Zahedi gallantly claims that artistic practice is a factory of illusions, of emotional traps, but upon closer inspection her composition become decompositions, contemporary avatars of the still lives and vanitas in « The Society of the Spectacle ».
Everything that was shiny or bright in classical painting, floral compositions, glazes, the silver scales of fish, is spread out here, completely real, before our eyes, before our nose as well, putrid, greasy… Her « Carpet of Flowers » (2012) mixes real and fake flowers, all of which have been picked in a cemetery, and reek either ofdust or of rot. The same is true of her sylphic « Danse Macabre » (2013) : instead of carefree birds on a branch, both the tree and the pigeons are dead, and even mummified. The world promised us by Aurélia Zahedi is our very own, a rotting world utrageously made up like a withered courtisan, who fails in hiding the bones jutting out from her cheeks, for she has become a mere skeleton. »