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2021 -2020 | Airplane wing, acrylic mirror 15 x 6 ft.
Jerome Foundation, Minneapolis, MN
“The glossy mirrorwork studding Nooshin Hakim Javadi’s sculpture is cut into a painstaking geometry. It shatters and warps one’s reflection upon its surface, dispersing light, line, and color. Thus, you confront yourself broken open, unable to discern where the edges and borders of your being begin and end. The sensation recalls the Greek root of the word diaspora: “to scatter across.” In traditional Iranian architecture the decorative mirrorwork practice, āina-kāri, often covers royal, ceremonial, and domestic spaces. Walls, window frames, pillars, vaulted ceilings, archways, and corridors are covered in dazzling mirror glass. In sacred spaces, the scattered reflection might also evoke a sense of unity, continuity, a melding into a hallowed collective, a cosmic whole. The mirrorwork tradition is shaped by the seminal philosophy of seventeenth-century mystic Mullah Sadra, who viewed existence as being at once singular, multiple, and unified.1 The broken mirrors transfigured into something far more vast and far more beautiful than the sum of its parts. And this is precisely what Javadi’s work achieves. In her hands, objects are at once destroyed, transformed, and alchemized. And yet, the objects themselves never quite complete their fraught metamorphosis. Uneasy remnants of their original form are ever lingering.” Essay by Nicole Nfonoyim-Hara