Lost Future Reimagined
In this project, Aishe Vejdani will engage her work with future that is in dialogue with political, social and cultural context of her present and past. In her recent body of work for the past few years, she has investigated her ancestors’ history and memory during the Sovietisation of Central Asia in Turkmenistan between 1920-1930. Brutality of Soviet Union leaves her ancestors who survived with no choice than leaving to and relocation in Iran, where Vejdani was born and raised.
Within this current work, Vejdani will investigate her ancestor’s relocation in Iran and its effect in shaping the perception of future within her family. What different context does to ones’s perception of future, and how a lost future in ones’ own land gets picked up in a foreign land? Furthermore in this project Vejdani’s Turkmen ethnicity within the tension of minority versus majority in Iran’s contemporary history and hence its effect in imagining future will be tackled.
From Memory to Memorial
‘From Memory to Memorial’ takes its reference from artists’ familial past around some historical events between 1920-1930 in Turkmenistan. While this decade was crucial for Turkmenistan to acquire a clearly defined territory under the Soviet rule, it came at huge cost to her ancestors: execution, confiscation of property, and displacement.
In 2017 she started exploring her familial history of that specific time period through her art practice and exhibited the final work in 2019 at B-galleria Turku, Finland. This current show is the continuation of the Turku show, however with a different angle. In Vejdani’s earlier show the focus was on studying the transmission of her familial history of that time through familial memory, while this time the focus is on portraying that memory and juxtaposing it with some elements. Elements such as Turkmen rituals, Turkmen epic stories, Turkmen carpet making, Turkmen written history, and western art history. This depicts her curiosity to construct a connection with all those elements. A connection that is either temporal ( before and after), spatial or relational. Through this built connection, she attempts to make her familial past visible and map it in a broader contemporary historical events.
Mediums of this project are painting and video work, and it was exhibited at Myymälä2
From Memory to Memorial: A Conversation With Aishe Vejdani
Anna Ruth interviewed Aishe Vejdani about her project "From Memory to Memorial" in the context of her larger body of work and their process of creation. This interview was published online magazine NO-NIIN