19 AUG 11: Sahar Ghanbari "Happiness Is Longing For Repetition"

London-based artist Sahar Ghanbari travels from city to city recording things: buildings, objects, bits of minutiae on index cards and tiny sketchbooks.  Her work results from a need to process daily information, re-organizing and configuring the mundane in graphic, detailed line drawing that recalls the obsessive cataloging of Bernd and Hilla Becher and rhythmic intensity of Thomas Broome.  

Born in Tehran and raised in both Göteborg and London, Sahar is accustomed to the ambiguities of the Stranger in a Strange Land.  In her newest work, a series of building façades robbed of perspective and drawn diagrammatically according to a pattern of loose grids, Sahar shows us the marquee and nameless structures that provide the visual identity of different cities, inviting us to look upon the displaced skylines as if studying them for the first time.  

While visually arresting, these works also register as slightly alienating.  The viewer inhabits the role of perpetual outsider, looking upon these objects and places with a scientific eye, without the benefit of human warmth or satisfying depth of field.  There's a sense of distance and examination, reminiscent of Diderot's Encyclopédie (1750), though Sahar's drawings seem to contain a persistent chaos, which seem only to be reigned in by the continuous and repetitive process of recording.




RABBITHOLE
33 Washington Street.  Brooklyn, New York 11201
Tel. 718 852 1500   |   www.rabbitholeprojects.com
 

Tehran (2011), ink on paper, 29.7x40cm

Glasgow (2011), ink on paper, 29.7x40cm