ART CITIES:N. York -Negin Sharifzadeh

Growing up in Iran in the wake of revolution, the multi-disciplinary artist Negin Sharifzadeh is fascinated by the interplay of different natural, emotional, and political systems. Sharifzadeh started working in animation and new media since her move to New York in 2010. She has explored these themes through the mediums of sculpture and stop-motion animation.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: A.I.R. Gallery Archive

Negin Sharifzadeh’s animation style grows out her earlier sculptural and performing arts practices. The props are made by hand, then captured in-camera, then digitally edited and sound designed. Her stories are inspired by familial tales, poetry, and politics, which she translates into collective, surreal and mythic structures. For example her latest stop-motion animated film, “Story of a Curse #”1 was inspired by the story of the artist’s mother moving through loss and despair after the still birth of her first child and only son. Birth, a symbol of bringing new life, had now changed to delivering death into the world of the living. She came to believe that she had been cursed. The film both explores the dreams of motherhood, the bond between a baby in the womb and the mother, and the role of magic can play in our processes of grief and resilience. In her solo exhibition “Inspector Sorrow” at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, the artist presents prints, video and interactive sculptures. In this new body of work, Sharifzadeh showcases the ephemera of an imagined film, a detective story entangled in quantum-level simulations, stacked up like a layer cake. The viewer is drawn into this entangled narrative-in the future and the present, via a psychotic break or a manipulation of a criminal mastermind-through video, storyboards, soundscapes, props, and faint whispers on an ancient telephone. Negin Sharifzadeh has built her body of work transforming her painstakingly made stop-motion films into immersive installations. In the exhibition, she extends this language into an exploration of the vocabulary of filmmaking itself, particularly the noir and detective stories as well as integrating interactive and digital components into her work for the first time. The result is disorienting, emotive, and quite intentionally, mysterious.

Info: A.I.R. Gallery, 155 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, Duration: 30/6-30/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.airgallery.org