One Work: Shirin Towfiq
Thinking About Migration, 2020, installation of twenty digital prints on gauze with fan, 15 x 10 ft.
[Video description: Twenty rectangular pieces of fabric hang vertically on a white wall. They are installed in two uneven rows, many overlapping each other, and are secured to the wall at each top corner. The translucent textiles are printed with the patterns of Persian carpets. As the video progresses, the fabric billows out from the wall as if moved by air currents.]
In Shirin Towfiq’s Thinking About Migration, faintly patterned, translucent fabric gently billows against a wall in a ghostly dance. While each rectangle of multi-colored textile is affixed to the wall at its top corners, they appear as if they might take flight at any moment, their ethereal weave buoyed by an invisible force. Upon closer consideration, it becomes clear that each piece of fabric bears the faint print of a Persian carpet, with botanical and geometric patterning in deep red, blue, green, and sand.
The earliest records of Persian carpets emerge around 400 BCE, and these textiles have since become one of the most emblematic art forms of Persian culture, as well as a valuable commodity in cross-cultural commerce. Known for their elaborate patterning, rich colors, and fine craftsmanship, they bear a history of profound cultural pride. The kineticism of Towfiq’s textiles invokes the “magic carpet,” a trope appearing in centuries-old tales throughout the vibrant Persian narrative tradition. Woven with magic thread, these carpets fly through the air and transport their riders across vast distances with speed.
For Towfiq, this ease of movement is a seductive and aspirational idea, but one that contradicts reality. Her parents and grandparents immigrated to the United States from Iran as refugees in the years leading up to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, escaping religious persecution for their Baha’i faith. While their departure was indeed swift, it was one of unwanted rupture. Her grandfather took five minutes to pack a suitcase containing just one extra suit, hoping he would soon return to his home. Her grandmother, formerly the jeweler to Iran’s royal family, wrapped jewelry she had crafted in wads of tissue in order to sneak it through airport security undetected. Her father was able to carry only twenty slide images as a record of their family’s history. They eventually settled in San Diego, forced to build a new existence while longing for their home. Throughout her life, Towfiq’s family has told her stories about Iran, wanting her to understand their home and what it meant for them to leave. Towfiq has never visited Iran, and so it has become a place existing, for her, only in her imagination, shaped by her family’s memory.
In Thinking About Migration, the faint print of the Persian carpet and the gauze’s material ethereality evoke the ephemeral nature of memory. These carpets dancing in the air suggest the migrant’s movement through space, culture, and time, as well as the attempt to sustain a relationship with a place no longer accessible. And, for Towfiq, a place and a life that she has never directly experienced, but toward which she still feels a pull. While making this work, the artist discovered that her family can trace its lineage to Kashan, a city in the northern part of Iran’s Isfahan province long famous as a center for carpet production. Rather than meticulously woven, as they have been in Kashan for centuries, Towfiq’s carpets are digitally printed. This process suggests both a stark remove from tradition and an effort to bridge that distance with the means at hand. With this fleet of magic carpets, Towfiq materializes not only her imaginings of Iran, but her family’s loss and determination in the face of forced migration.
— Elizabeth Rooklidge, Editor, HereIn