The 2024/2025 season at CALM – Centre d’Art La Meute continues with a carte blanche for Shirin Yousefi. Her work focuses on the S.W.A.N.A. region (South-West Asia, North Africa). She has created an installation specifically for this invitation. Several events designed collectively with the artist will punctuate the two-month exhibition. In addition to public guided tours, you’ll be invited to take part in a sound performance and a collective translation workshop.
The public will discover a structure made of 2,400 terracotta bricks (cellar floor), a sound piece, a coat rack on which hang bags concealing alcohol, and pilgrims’ jackets filled with pebbles.
The exhibition pays tribute to the “Bazm”. A time of meeting, discussion and music, often conceived as a transitional space, to fill those moments of waiting and latency, always present before and after the “Razm”, the fight, the struggle. Waiting is synonymous with the passage of time. Are we talking about losing or gaining time? Resonating with the political and militant gestures of S.W.A.N.A.’s popular protests, the objects presented create an environment whose state, both stable and fragile, can change completely.
Bazm” unfolds around a wall. An impenetrable wall that we hold. Indeed, “holding the wall” refers to the physical presence of people, particularly young people in Eastern countries, who, haunted by the desire for change, spend time leaning against the walls of urban space. Perceived as waiting, inaction or boredom, often qualified as pejorative, this concept reflects a sensitive presence, a posture inscribed in a history of corporality, a form of resistance and preservation of community spaces. These moments of transition regularly break down suddenly, spontaneously and rapidly: thanks to the riot. Unlike the organized, collective and tolerated demonstration, the riot is an uprising governed by one or more bodies out of sync in a given space. It generates a change of axis, because it is not underpinned by a plan. It is volatile.
Sound plays an important role here. It designates the concrete presence of objects and binds them together. Whistling sounds come from the wall, awakening memories. Whistling is considered frivolous, profane or seductive, depending on the context. It also has functional uses in rural contexts. The whistles, reviving memories of past and present struggles, describe both a technical prowess, a modernity in learning, and a melancholy in the emotion transmitted to the listener.
The wine that accompanies the exhibition opening is camouflaged in shopping bags. Its hidden presence is a form of resistance that inspires courage, celebration and sharing. It allows a community to stand facing the wall, to remember and unite in a common goal. Next to it are pilgrim’s jackets filled with pebbles, the garment for the outdoors, to hold on to the wall no matter what the weather.
Shirin Yousefi was born in 1986 in Teheran, Iran, and lives and works in Pully.
She studied theater and cinema at the University of Teheran. Following the post-election uprising in Iran in 2009, she decided to come to Switzerland to continue her studies. She graduated in 2017 from the Master in Visual Arts, Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne.
During her Master’s studies, she was invited to show her work as part of the Kadist Prize at the Kunsthalle Zürich in 2017, of which she was the winner. She subsequently showed her work at Nottingham Contemporary in England, the Swiss Institute in New York and the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris, among others.
Shirin Yousefi’s work is multi-disciplinary, multi-sensory and spatial. Her research is based on geopolitical issues related to S.W.A.N.A., drawing on current and past histories that she studies from multiple sources. Following on from her research into the notion of border, landscape and transition, whether geopolitical or ideological, oscillating between reality and spectacle, the artist continues her questioning of imposed and imposable limits. She constructs works composed of sculptural and/or impalpable and volatile elements, which conceal themselves in the morphology of the space that hosts them.
Shirin Yousefi’s work uses sound, smell, movement and installation to offer the public sensory tales and mental images with unlimited evocative power.
The artist has been awarded a number of prizes and distinctions, including Walter & Eve Kent in 2018 and Prix culturel Leenaards in 2020.
