Nooshin Hakim Javadi works at the intersection of sculpture, installation, and performance. Her practice investigates the material culture of conflict in a range of ways—from objects that undergo the poetry of a destructive metamorphosis to interactive installations for shared vulnerability and empathy. She reimagines popular games as political objects that invite satirical engagement with difficult geopolitical issues. While playful, they also create visual metaphors for how conquest, in manifold forms, often masks itself as liberation.
Javadi has received several awards and fellowships including Jerome Fellowship for early-career artists and was a 2018/19 Target Studio for Creative Collaboration Fellow at the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis. Jerome Fellow for Franconia SculpturePark and Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center, while completing her MFA in studio art from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her interdisciplinary works and performances have been shown at Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany; Parks Exhibition Center, Idyllwild, California; Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey; Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim, Neuenhaus, Germany; Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Wisconsin; Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at the University of Notre Dame.
Research Statement:
Throughout my life, I have been intrigued by the concept of freedom and its absence in everyday personal situations. I have explored this topic through various mediums, such as journalism, social practice, and sculpture, and have come to realize how these personal situations are closely linked to larger societal issues. As a woman living in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I tried to understand the systems that produce inequity and conflict. However, the more I delved into this complex topic, the more I understood how it is deeply connected to issues such as oil, carbon democracy, and racial geography. My interest lies in utilizing these connections and exploring blind spots that may exist within these narratives.
My work is grounded in sculpture, drawing from the material culture of conflict. The current projects I am working on are centered around topics that have a significant impact on my country - namely, oil and resistance. The narrative around these subjects is frequently heard in media yet is often devoid of the racial dynamics, the role of women and minorities, environmental narratives tied to these issues, and the distinct beneficiaries and bearers of its costs.
My interest in the material life of conflict began more than a decade ago when I started collecting debris from the Tehran riots against the government. These objects traveled with me to America, acting as relics of resistance. I began to experiment with acknowledging their relic (from the Latin feminine “remaining” based on linquere “to leave”) status by coating them in copper sulfate—a chemical compound marketed as Root Killer. Like the police presence in Iran, copper sulfate, deployed agriculturally, suppresses, symbolically weeding out dissidence. This experiment resulted in Requiem—a series of objects whose conflicted pasts are preserved in crystalline facades, holding the tension between beauty and violence, remaining and leaving.
In my current project, although not working from within the protest in Iran, I am actively involved in creating an archive of women’s oral history in relation to the feminist movement within the country. Building upon previous archival initiatives like the Iranian Oral History Project at Harvard, only eleven of the oral histories offered are from those subjects identifying as women; my project posits revision and allows us the opportunity to take a closer look at the current and historical narratives in relation to the women's uprising. This archival work aims to reorient the control of the historical narrative lens by excavating the voices of marginalized women.
In the studio, my practice is heavily influenced by āina-kāri, a geometric mirror craft that originated from the need to repair broken mirrors but is now disappearing. This craft manifests the philosophy of Mullah Sadra, who viewed existence as singular and multiple yet somehow unified. His views have deeply affected me, a woman who willfully left post-revolution Iran, but not its political and social trauma. My personal experience has made me empathetically open to the conflicts various people experience, but also deeply interested in the possibility of subsequent repair. Not only is mirror work a desire to repair, but it is also a manifestation of Mulla Sadra's philosophy in the form of craft.
āina-kāri is a slow process of repair. The importance of this craft in my practice is the way it challenges the imposed time pressure and provides a framework for care that undermines the dominant system of production. Instead, I employ slowness as an act of resisting the fast-paced, consumption-driven world when I cover the surface of an airplane wing with āina-kāri, a slow process that requires contemplation.
In my Social practice, I also ask questions about the social construction of race, environmental racism, and the way marginalized communities mobilize. For example, in Radio Rhizome, I collaborated with Lawmakers, Engineers, and the physics department at the University of Minnesota. We transformed the metal architectural facade of the Weisman Art Museum into a broadcasting antenna—acting as a tool of resistance to engage and empower undocumented communities.
My approach to research is highly collaborative and relies on establishing relationships with other researchers who can offer a wide point of entry into the subject. For example, my recent project, Fossilized Past, attempted to understand the land and environmental racism around Lake Michigan, where I live now. This work results from 1.5 years of environmental research and surveys of the Great Lakes region with environmental engineers, Architects, Civil engineers, cultural critiques, and a whistle-blower examining and investigating the soil close to Oil pipelines and industries. The data extracted from the samples became the sonification basis of algorithms that produce tonalities from sound samples of the sites we have investigated. This iteration serves as a cartography of toxin-impacted regions, primarily on treaty lands and black, immigrant, and working-class neighborhoods of the urban areas of the Great Lakes.