shirin bolourchi

I have nothing to say as an artist, I’m not interested in what I know. The job of an artist is not to do with what we know. To me the artist is like a fool, an idiot, going on a journey to discover something and I think the quality of that discovery is the mysterious mythology of an artist and that’s what I’m doing. 

I go to my studio and work on something, and something happens, and then I say Ahh! This is what it means – this is what it is about – and then you make something, and then some months later you are in your studio again and you make something else… and it’s about the same thing. There is in a way a constant continuum  that gives up the same question again and again, so those are the questions to me; the void object or the none object, and  then – many questions about color, question about space and time and etc. . Because I do believe there has to be a new object, there has to be a new space and after post-structuralist philosophers, what is the object in psychoanalysis after all? What is the state of the object? Hence, these are the things that keep coming up all the time. 

One of the things that I’m interested in is the idea that the object is unlimited – the physical object always has a non-physical counterpart – and the two are in some strange dialogue. But when it’s right, the physical object is not limited by its physical self. You know if we think about ourselves or our body as an object we occupy ourselves, but I know I’m not just my skin and I think the same is true of all those things that we reflect upon as art. It’s a very special condition, the possibility of the objects being something other, I’m interested in that. 

Our sense of vision is very good, very quick in telling the difference between something that is real and something that is not real. Real meaning here is not actual, but a meaning well conceived, well thought about, well made, well, and perhaps even let’s say spiritually real. We know the difference, so I think that’s difficult to make. The difficulty of the art object that has to be psychically real, even though it has a problematic relationship with reality itself, if you can still decipher what I mean by now. 

I’m very interested in color, as well as other mythological things. There are two ways that I try to deal with color; one of them is that I try to make the condition in color so it’s not a painted surface anymore – it’s a condition that is concrete in such a way that it occupies the whole space of your vision. It’s almost as if you are going to the shower the water comes down on you, you are wet. I want to make something that has the same quality as concrete so it’s a total condition. The other aspect about color is that it changes – especially as a very intense monochrome – it’s as if it makes more space;  I’m interested in that as a question. That the color is abstract, while we are associating color with natural things, in its essence the color always remains abstract and it is that abstract quality that makes space. 

Art is not to be interesting –  art has to provoke philosophical questions – even if we don’t know that the questions are philosophical. In that process of reflection between the work and the viewer in this coming and going, something happens that is maybe as poetic, maybe complicated indeed. To take this further,  I must bring forth that I am also inspired by architecture at my roots; architecture exists to create the physical environment in which people live, but architecture is more than just the built environment, it’s also a part of our culture. It stands as a representation of how we see ourselves, as well as how we see the world.