Raheleh Filsoofi
Palate in shedspace will house a new installation of interdisciplinary artist Raheleh Filsoofi’s video Bite, presented alongside a series of corresponding ceramic plates.
Bite is a practice of resilience and resistance. It attempts to bring the buried histories of the past forth and aim to reimagine and transcend the colonial narrative present in clay particles of the earth and artifact throughout history. The artist, woman, and immigrant, and the one who bites is the witness and an agent to expose the urgency of the contemporary moments. She offers her body as a tool and its ability to embed its unique, identifying mark on clay artifacts for future narrative and interpretation. A new narrative that emerges in respect to past knowledge, to value the act of making pattern of her existence, of her strength in the current political landscape. Both labor and ritual, the physicality of the action provoke attention to the internal. Form, pattern, and function captured as she sinks her teeth into the clay, an artifact from when her body and spirit were borderless, an act of defiance and affirmation. To leave a mark of her existence for the future. To change the narrative. To become the narrative.
Images by Mike Jensen
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Raheleh Filsoofi is a collector of soil and sound, an itinerant artist, feminist curator, and community service advocate. Her work synthesizes socio-political statements as a point of departure and further challenges these fundamental arguments by incorporating ancient and contemporary media such as ceramics, poetry, ambient sound, and video. Her interdisciplinary practices act as the interplay between the literal and figurative contexts of land, ownership, immigration, and border.
Her recent exhibitions include Imagined Boundaries, an interactive multimedia installation at Gibbes Museum in Charleston, SC (2023-2024), and Only Sound Remains, an interactive multimedia installation at the Sharjah Biennial 15, Thinking Historically in the Present in Sharjah, UAE (2023). Filsoofi’s Imagined Boundaries a multimedia installation, consisting of two separate exhibitions, debuted concurrently in a solo exhibition at the Abad Gallery in Tehran and group exhibition Dual Frequency at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida in 2017. The installation in each country connected audiences in the U.S. and Iran for few hours in the night of the show opening.
She has been the 2022 Winner of the 1858 Contemporary Southern Art Award and the recipient of the 2021 Southern Prize Tennessee State Fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor of Ceramics in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University. She holds an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Florida Atlantic University and a B.F.A. in Ceramics from Al-Zahra University in Tehran, Iran.