MOT International is delighted to host a solo exhibition of new works by Vanessa Safavi. The artist creates installations consisting of sculptures and two-dimensional works that take post-minimalism practices as their source. Inspired by soft sculpture and the use of pliable industrial materials Safavi evokes biological materials - emissions of fluid; skin and organs.

The first pictures of the earth and the moon triggered a global awareness of the unique and fragile nature of our planet. The Apollo program promoted the dissemination of innovations in the field of materials science and engineering and promoted advances in computers and technology.

Vanessa Safavi’s exhibition, Airbags, was inspired initially by NASA tests and simulations of crashes, accidents or gravity tests used to prepare astronauts for space missions. A decrease in bone density and muscle mass, balance disorders, sleep disturbances, cardiovascular irregularities and immune system depression are common symptoms experienced by astronauts during a mission. Intense preparations are required in order to reduce the syndromes. The title Airbags evokes impact, when the physicality of the matter meets the human body. At the very moment or the very limit when the body transcends to a different sphere, it enters a process that Lygia Clark located as “where the frontier between body and object is broken”.

Safavi is interested in the sense of alienation that we have with our body, suggesting that it exists in the hybridity between the tool, the unconscious machine and the hyperreal object. The exhibition expands her research on the interpretation of the body as a physical form more than a social or cultural entity. More generally, she is interested in the way our modern cultures colonise nature. When the space mission sent advance technology satellites and space probes to observe and collect data from space, it was a form of colonisation. But more than that, developing intelligent machines to increase this form of colonisation provoked political fears and human curiosity.

This phenomena of hybridisation prompted Safavi to develop a new series of sculptures made from steel, silicones and bandages. Imagined as a synthesis between the human body, the satellite and prosthetic devices, the pieces in the show reflect upon the mutability between nature and technology. Fragile, delicate and aerial, their physicality recall anthropomorphic shapes, banded and covered by silicones—hybrids of human organs and asteroids.

About the artist

Using pliable industrial materials such as silicones, Safavi makes references to post-minimalistic practices and in particular to ‘soft sculpture’. Within this context, her sculptures appear in transition between different states; from solid to liquid and animated.

Evoking the atrophied body, the work of Safavi also highlights a certain vision of the female body. Through the use of fragile materials and vulnerable gestures, she composes a fiction of the body, which becomes itself an object, the receptacle of a lived physical experience. Her work, marked by poetry, emphasises all at once the pain, shock and conscience of the body when it is ‘out of whack’.

Safavi’s reference to Lygia Clark lays in the relation to the alienation of the body, the ‘quasi-body’. Clark’s urge for an intimate sensation of the interior life allowed her to cease classical artistic production and to step towards a healing and therapeutic practice by making her “participative sculptures” happenings, which included people and healing objects. Looking into this practice but nonetheless witnessing her contemporary posture, Safavi combines materials to explore new forms and fashions that evolve our technological ‘being’ without however denying a therapeutic need.