Yosra Mojtahedi
L ’ É r o s a r b é n u s - Installation - 2020
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 22
Installation
L ’ É r o s a r b é n u s is a space, a place, a body, a void. It breathes, it desires. I remember. I have touched flower, fruit and fluvial water. The flower palpitated like a heart/breast, like an arm or like a sex after orgasm. Four possibilities on the four bits of black cliff with hanging, bleeding leaves/fruits. The blood of the mothers of Venus suffocating on the breast of a black sky.
Listen, it is the note flowing under her feet. She becomes water, earth, and it is the air that makes her live. It flows in her veins, in her breasts, in her flesh. She breathes. The earth falls. The earth falls, it becomes cube, square, fountain. It breathes. Its phallic muscles will move. They are robots, gentle and soft. Time is a recipient of decision that holds to the horse’s mane. It breathes like a lemon tree, a sex flower, an organism, a frozen moment. It grows wet, it palpitates, like a long river, like an unlimited regime. Like a man who governs and concerns himself with the glory of a dead bird, a cut tree. A dry leaf. A burned forest. A smoky sky.
An intimate smell spread in the shadows of your lungs, you heart trembles, her voice enters your veins. Listen, she is breathing. Touch her darkness. Night is steeping you in her empire.
*_ L ’ É r o s a r b é n u s_ is a portmanteau word comprising Eros, arbre (tree) and Venus.
Yosra Mojtahedi
I obtained an MA in fine arts, and then a degree in beaux-arts when I settled in France. Le voyage... ce mystère leafs through my sketchbook. Coming from a country where the body is a taboo subject and its representation forbidden, my work reacts by being sensual and sensory, tactile and olfactory, sometimes touching on eroticism and femininity. It is steeped in a surrealist, obscurantist atmosphere. A space free of places and times, where objects and elements are symbolic: flowers, stones, umbilical cords, organs, in a twilight penumbra. If anything has oriented my work, it is surely Iranian censorship.
Production
Partners
Acknowledgments
Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Beat Gysin, Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, Christian Duriez, Stefan Escaida Navarro, Thor Morales Bieze, Nicolas Guichard, Timothée Couteau, Hani Mojtahedi, Hélène Soete, Jonathan Pêpe, Louis Bazin, Simon Dube.
