Statement:

Dieu Donné is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Nazanin Noroozi titled "This Bitter Earth". An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 30, 2023. The exhibition features an expansive collection of work created by Noroozi during her Marabeth Cohen-Tyler Print/Paper Fellowship. Nazanin Noroozi’s work mines public, personal, and historical archives, manipulating and layering found images and videos to elicit feelings of displacement, tragedy, and instability. Her practice is rooted in a search for universal evocations of loss and longing, often described as melancholia, the Portuguese saudade, or the Turkish huzun. While she often works in multiple, Noroozi’s work is not editioned: her repetition of imagery serves as distinct and alternative versions of history, memory, people, and place, or as non-temporal sequences of events.///

Noroozi works with imperfect materials: poorly framed or overexposed family photos, shaky or blurred amateur clips, or pixelated, low quality video recordings. By reconfiguring; painting and printing on top of; digitally altering; and layering details; Noroozi abstracts her found images to create ambiguous representations of historical events and family memories, transforming her source clips into collective histories. At Dieu Donné, Noroozi combined traditional printmaking and hand papermaking techniques, alternating between the wet and dry studios to achieve richer and more controlled colors and tones in her work. This Bitter Earth juxtaposes works by Noroozi in paper, print, and video, allowing imagery from the artist’s hand-painted film to “leak” onto the walls of the exhibition space and create fragments or ghostly repetitions of historical and personal moments. The viewer is invited to reconstruct time and create new narratives through a nonlinear experience of the work, merging and interspersing stories, and reframing specific events as shared sentiments. The exhibition presents a new series of handmade paper artworks centered around found footage and archival images from viral news stories juxtaposed with hand painted Super 8 family movie frames. The body of work encompasses four main image series that Noroozi reconsidered and revisited in multiple: the 2020 downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 by the Iranian government; the devastating explosion at the Port of Beirut, Lebanon in 2020; the last U.S. airplane leaving Afghanistan in 2021 after the military’s withdrawal; and home footage of a childhood birthday party in Iran. Imagery from Noroozi’s Super 8 home videos serves as a foil to the political permutations of instability and insecurity described above. Punctuating the historical horrors around them, the birthday party Noroozi depicts in paper pulp becomes tinged with tension, as though the celebrants are anticipating a disruption to their joy. By blurring and distorting the home videos and news footage alike, Noroozi removes the individuality of her subjects to allow viewers to insert themselves and their own stories into the found images. She universalizes otherwise personal feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and despondence: a sense of sadness at the loss of life, despair at betrayal of principle, and the helplessness of losing control of one’s destiny ripple out globally. This Bitter Earth Nazanin Noroozi is curated by Eliana Blechman.