Around fifteen years ago, Iranian-Canadian artist Anahita Norouzi set up a multidisciplinary work project articulated around the notion of identity. At the intersection of archaeology, history, and migration issues, Norouzi draws on her immigrant background to form the basis of a post-humanist reflection that one might call a becoming-other<\/em>. Norouzi reveals the resilience of identity by bringing to light new socio-material and affective configurations of objects, plants, and lands plundered by colonial violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The series Spoken Objects: Reweaving Fractures and Ghosts<\/em> (2023) and All Our Relations<\/em> (2021\u2013\u200a22) echo the museological codes of ethnographic exhibitions to highlight the need for a trans-historic restoration. In All Our Relations<\/em>, fragments of pre-Colombian pottery bought on eBay are juxtaposed with reconstructions of Persian objects produced from artefacts of unknown origin and date. By presenting such rearrangements of traditional Middle Eastern objects in a contemporary art context\u200a\u2014\u200aobjects discredited by the Western gaze, simultaneously frowned upon and preserved in museums\u200a\u2014\u200aNorouzi reconciles the past with the present while deploying a kind of diasporic narrative. Through these broken or enigmatic objects, their exhibition, and their apparent precariousness, she builds a unique visual vocabulary, marked both by fragility and by notions of persistence and care. Although her works are the poetic expression of a recollective desire, first and foremost they crystallize a profound desire for repair, akin to what may be termed cultural resilience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norouzi is also interested in botany and in plants as a transactional space between the political and the cultural. In the installations The Constellational Diasporas<\/em> (2022), Remains<\/em> (2021\u200a\u2013\u200a22), and Displaced Garden<\/em> (2020), motifs and objects based on plants indigenous to the Middle East and Africa enable the exploration of the colonial heritage with which some plants are laden\u200a\u2014\u200aand then suddenly treated as weeds when they take root in Western soil. Immigration and xenophobia are here brought into tension, as Norouzi reveals the tacit power relationships that mark the very notion of alterity, yet also these plant ecologies\u2019 strategies for regeneration and resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Ron Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holding a master\u2019s degree in art history with a concentration in feminist studies, Anne-Marie Dubois uses the critical potential of feminist and queer theories to debunk different discourses\u2019 ontological claim to truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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