ARTISTS

Fia Backström

Project Space (2019)

Against the Sun: The photographs of Tahereh Fallahzadeh and the exhibition architecture of Fia Backström

Fia Backström (b. 1970, Sweden) is an artist based in New York. Working in diverse mediums including photography, writing, installation, and performance, Backström agitates the social life of language and materials. Her practice maintains a longstanding inquiry into the glue of collectivity. Recent solo projects include The Shape of Co- to Come at ABF, Stockholm (2016), and ME have to be turned upside down to become WE at Zinc Bar, New York (2014). She has participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as MoMA PS1 (2015), MoMA (2010), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2008) in New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010); and Tranzit, Prague (2008). Backström was the subject of a survey at the Artist’s Institute in 2015 and represented Sweden in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Her work can be found in the collections of Moderna Museet and the Whitney Museum.

The photographs of Tahere Fallahzadeh and the exhibition architecture of Fia Back-strom.

This show unites two photographic processes, the work of Tahereh Fallahzadeh and Fia Back-strom. As one of the few female photographers to pursue an unorthodox and experimental photography as a mode of fine art and at the same time working in an academic context teaching photographic methods as a source of income in Iran, Tahereh Fallahzadeh’s work asserts a politics and an emotional resonance unique to the history of photography. Although not well known outside of Iran, Fallahzadeh’s mostly small scale traditional darkroom photographs combine elements of collage, photograms, and chemical mark through intuitive processes in a distinct manner that feels at once rooted in history and at the same time very contemporary. In the context of Fia Backstrom’s work, which has challenged artistic conventions over the past three decades of her career, Fallahzadeh’s photographs further complicate the question of what it means to work as a female identified artist within oppressive conditions. Backstrom’s work has often included unconventional exhibition designs, performative work, and often exists through collaboration or the incorporation of others directly into her own work. 

Our interest in these two artists and their parallels arrives at a moment of political chaos, a moment when such an exhibition pushes against the boundaries of what is allowed to exist together and in what context. This show aims to put Fallahzadeh and Backstrom into a complex conversation around the boundaries of image making; when, how, and who is able to lift up a camera and when, if ever, will those images be seen. These questions of power and authority are the framework for our proposal, although the images themselves on view resonate within the language and history of photography. In bringing together two different practices that present the impossibility of being seen we hope to provide a site to further understand how context changes what and how we see.