Pantea Karimi: ARTFUL ATTACKS

In the past few months, while working on her new series Artful Attacks, Karimi has been preoccupied with thoughts of political pressure and sanctions on Iran. The title refers to the mysterious attacks that have targeted Iran’s nuclear power plants in the historic city of Natanz. Her new body of work was shaped organically as a reaction to the coverage of these incidents in the media. As a result, Karimi’s 42-foot-long scroll drawings visualize deconstructed, interrupted, and ambiguously arranged geometric patterns as a metaphor for political pressure and tension.

In her pieces, Karimi has appropriated geometric and tiling patterns with Kufic script from a 97-foot late medieval Iranian document called the Topkapi scroll housed at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Turkey.

In a group of ceramic tiles, Karimi used words that surfaced in both the Iranian press and mainstream western media, such as cyberattack, sanctions, nuclear power, covert war, mysterious explosion, and political tension. Like Kufic geometric ceramic tiles found in the Topkapi scroll as well as Natanz historic shrines and mosques, Karimi’s Kufic arrangements are composed in a somewhat undecipherable manner. The choice for the pairing of black and yellow comes from the standard nuclear power logo.

Through erasing, blurring, re-drawing, de-coloring, and re-coloring the same patterns, Karimi creates new patterns and disturbed surfaces. Artful Attacks is comprised of large scroll drawings, ceramic Kufic tiles, and performative videos collectively representing her emotional unease at constant threats to the historical city of Natanz and its medieval architecture—as an exemplar of the whole Iranian culture and nation.