Shirana Shahbazi: MONSTERA

Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland

Overview
Installation view, Shirana Shahbazi: MONSTERA, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland, 2014
Installation view, Shirana Shahbazi: MONSTERA, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland, 2014

The artist’s series Monstera exhibited in the Kunsthalle’s lower galleries are photos of leaves of the eponymous common houseplant. As the artist remarks, botanical photography is as ubiquitous of a practice as taking holiday pictures. Shot in controlled studio conditions, backlit, in some cases against a backdrop of multi-colored lights, printed on a hyper glossy photographic paper, the resulting artworks glow with the artificial intensity of a neon-lit icon.

While these works may appear from a distance to be computer-generated imagery, just as the patina of the holiday picture could at first glance seem to be the product of some filter found on any cell-phone camera, these objects are instead the result of an involvement with the concrete, material properties of photography that borders on the fetishistic. Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Jasper Johns’s famous definition of art applies here. Shirana Shahbazi continuously interweaves formal and processual categories belonging to the history of photography, creating in the process objects of an otherworldly beauty.
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