Yosra Mojtahedi
Vitamorphose - Installation - 2019
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 21
Installation
Vitamorphose is a sculpture and sound installation that creates a physical relationship with the viewer. It brings together organic and mineral forms, creating an object that is both alive and inert, an abstraction of human and animal bodies, in a universe that is both poetic and ironic.
Its forms are also an allusion to Venus, goddess of love and seduction, female beauty and civilization. It brings together male fire with female water in order to create life.
Vitamorphose also talks about censorship by showing a few stones and rocks that turn into female and male sexual organs.
Vitamorphose is a robotic sculpture made from flexible materials that reacts to other living creatures: their mere presence will modify its structure. As a result, this object that seems immobile and dead sometimes shows “signs of life.” Seeing this sculpture leads you to question yourself: is it alive? But what is life? Until the 19th century “living” matter was distinguished from “inert” matter. Where is the border between the two? Are my nails and tooth enamel alive? Today, in the light of scientific knowledge, one is tempted to redefine life as that mysterious and universal tendency of material to combine and organise itself, becoming more complex. Animal and plant life are, as far as we know, the most evolved forms. What existence do the objects around us have? Are they inert and dead or do they have a life that’s different from ours?“Inanimate objects, do you have a soul?” wrote Alphonse de Lamartine (Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, 1830).
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.
