Full interview by David Mann and published in the Daily Maverick
Movement necessitates change. The act of travelling to different places with new contexts shifts our ways of seeing and engaging with the world, and influences our understanding of the places we’ve journeyed from. This is true of artists, too. In addition to training, collaboration, and exploration, an artist’s practice is deeply affected by the places in which they live and work.
The artist Nava Derakshani has, over the years, worked across ceramics, performance, photography, video, and installation, moving from architectural studies to artistic practice. Born in Southern Africa to Iranian parents, Derakshani has lived, studied, and worked in cities including Cape Town, Mbabane, Gaborone, Johannesburg, and New York, where she has recently completed her MFA at Hunter College.
In this conversation, Derakshani speaks to David Mann about her evolving practice, and how different cities – along with their particular socio-economic and political contexts, environments, histories, and ways of working – have necessitated key shifts in her approach to art-making.
David Mann:
In preparation for this conversation, I was going through your website, and one of the things that’s interesting to me is how many forms your practice has taken over the years. There is the move from architecture to photography to collage, then into performance, and most recently, ceramics and sculpture. I know that quite a few of these changes have been facilitated through different institutions – UCT, Stellenbosch, Hunter – but I’m more interested in what’s remained, through these iterations, as a conceptual throughline or central interest in your work. What, for you, runs through all of these practices, mediums, and bodies of work?
For me, the impulse has been around art making through material exploration, and the seeking of joy through the specific medium. Clay, for example, is a grounding material that requires patience and attentiveness from the maker. I wanted to become a master thrower, and that requires dedicated, meditative attention. I cannot throw well on days when I have had an argument, for example. The act of repetition for mastery is very attractive to me and is part of the artistic process and growth of an artist. I had the privilege of making a number of iterations of my performance piece with new collaborators, and this contributed to the work’s evolution with the input of my collaborators' expertise. I see materials as tools to accomplish the art that I am seeking; the more tools I have in my box, the more freedom I have to make new work.
At the same time, there are thematic throughlines in all of my work. Studying architecture at the University of Cape Town gave me a spatial understanding of the remnants of apartheid’s segregation in Cape Town and the deep injustices perpetuated on the city scale. My investigation into my family’s migration stories highlighted the traumas my parents and their peers endured. Their exile was bequeathed to me, placing me in a constant state of yearning for the unattainable. Critical engagement with my inherited Orientalisms, the mediation of second-hand access to a forbidden homeland, and the inevitable romanticising and distortion that comes through this mitigated translation of culture. I think this is a common experience in the Global Diaspora and is something I grapple with in my art: a longing for belonging that just can’t be. Themes along lines of gender are always present with me, from playfully poking fun at global patriarchies or exploring themes of beauty and self-expression. The South African discourse on feminism, and through a diasporic Persian and Iranian lens, is a part of me.
That constant state of yearning you talk about feels like it charges a lot of your work. Part of it feels related to place – creating work about your ancestry and identity while based in Cape Town, or staging an iteration of a performance in New York that holds a distinctly South African style of collaboration – but I wonder what the distance lends to your practice. A critical distance, maybe? Do you think you’d be making the same kind of work in Tehran, for example? Or eSwatini?
Being in New York, I identify as a double immigrant, responding to the language they use here as a “first” or “second-generation” migrant. It’s interesting being here because the discourse is centred on New York / the USA, and there is hardly room for thinking of Africa or South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) as a centre, or the centre, or even of local cultures as central. It asked me for a lot of adaptation to translate my positionality in this context. I feel critical of the Global North’s pervasive role in geopolitics, while still choosing to situate myself here. It seems to be a leap to decentre global whiteness. I think of The Curio Shop, presented by the Asian American artists collective Godzilla in 1993. The show was a direct response to stereotypes of Chinese / Asian tropes, through an uncomfortable leaning into and exaggerating of stereotypes associated with Asians by using the motif of a Chinatown souvenir store. For me, this is still centred on a dominant North American POV, rather than focusing on peripheral cultures as central. On the other hand, the discourse I come from in South Africa is a rejection of a peripheral status and a focus on our perspective as not only important, but central. My use of the Farsi language, therefore, is inherently subversive. My South African style of collaboration, as you call it, is less individualistic and was about the input of the artists that I was working with, to make something amazing together.
I was at the Guggenheim recently to see Rashid Johnson’s show. He leans deeply on what he refers to as black identity markers, such as shea butter, black wax and soap, and African tropes such as masks and zebra skins, the wilderness, and the occasional guest feature of Persian carpets in his “black yoga” pieces. I think it's interesting how tropes of identity are uncomfortably exaggerated or simplified in the diaspora, and how our positionality lends itself to a removed sensibility and a longing for something that is simply unattainable, in an effort for place-making in the places we exist.
I can’t imagine the kind of work I would make in Tehran because it simply is not an option for me. When I look at artists in the country, their political response is one of subversion and deceit as they negotiate a deeply censored and monitored art space, using the gallery to make statements that unfold over time to reveal hidden meanings, because they have to submit government proposals for their shows. We can look at similar examples of art made by artists in Africa, where the use of materials and gestures is embedded in a framework of understanding within the culture and place. El Anatsui’s use of bottle tops, or his cargo canvases, for example. They make so much sense to me, while they also translate into the Western gaze, where there is an emphasis on materiality. Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Message still holds strongly in a contemporary art space. And I think if I were making art in eSwatini, it would be material-heavy, responding to the geography and climate of my birthplace.
I like what you say about “a removed sensibility”. The South African writer Zoë Wicomb passed away last year, and I’ve been revisiting her work. She wrote so intimately and with such lucidity about South African life, but all from the UK, where she moved to when she was 22. So, there’s something to be said about that removal from the place you’re speaking back to in your work – how that distance allows for a view of “the centre” from the margins, so to speak.
David Mann:
You shared an artwork the other day, and it struck me how the use of light is put to work as a kind of prompt for performance or engagement – the projected text requiring a processional, almost devotional walk around the sculpture in order to be read. It seems like there’s something similar going on with the sculptures you made during your time at Hunter, particularly the Golden Samovar sculpture, which required a different navigation from the audience and came ‘alive’ through the use of water. Could you tell me a bit about that work, and maybe about your time at Hunter as well? It seems like your practice underwent a significant shift while you were there.
It’s interesting to use these two works as a comparison: one is, as you say, devotional and memorial in nature, the other is satirical, cynical, and humorous. They both speak to gender, but in drastically different tones and media.
The light sculpture emerged from my performance piece involving light and shadow. I was still deeply moved by a feminist uprising in Iran and the diaspora following the state murder of Jina Mahsa Amini, combined with the discovery of Hunter’s laser cutter.
I started making cutouts with the machine from photos documenting graffiti in Iran at the time. City walls became sites for revolutionary messages, which were routinely cleaned or marked out by the authorities, only to be rewritten, censored again, and then rewritten again. This became a public dialogue of repression and defiance, written and rewritten over and over again by an unruly public, and witnessed on the internet. I used the graffiti wall texts, with their dripping, spray-painted, handwritten lines, to make luminous objects. This was an act that refused their censorship in Iran, by effusing their words on the other side of the planet.
This was the power of diaspora in that unusually unified moment. For a while, almost all Iranians were united and in a deep solidarity with one another. While those in Iran were being suppressed, the diaspora was amplifying their stories and creating massive momentum internationally, with huge protest marches, where one in Berlin amounted to approximately 100,000 people who travelled in bus-fulls from around the region.
My Baha’i upbringing fed me stories of a feminist figure, Tahirih, who boldly unveiled herself in a public gathering in 19th-century Persia. Named “The Pure One,” her act was deeply unsettling to her pious peers, and her message was clear: the time for women’s equality is now. To me, the young women burning their headscarves in Tehran, in circles reminiscent of witch fables, girls holding hands, one covered and another with her long, thick hair on her back, reminded me of Tahirih and the power of her act that led to her execution, a similar fate met by many protestors in Iran.
The use of our languages is meaningful when prejudices have been weaponised to justify painful international policies. It is in itself a bold act, and taken up by the diaspora, where gold name-necklaces and T-shirts saying Brooklyn or New York in Farsi/Arabic text are popular. And now, New York City has elected its first charismatic Muslim-Ugandan-Indian rapper as mayor. To mark ourselves as present in places that actively Other us is meaningful.
To speak about the Golden Samovar, there are many entry points to this installation, but the South African one is Brett Murray’s African Maquette (2000) sculpture that I would walk past on my daily commute to work in Cape Town, alongside many other working residents of the city. In the piece, copies of cartoon character Bart Simpson’s head are welded to a copy of an African curio. I enjoy the humour and political satire in this work, and Murray’s willingness to play with his positionality.
Similarly, my installation exaggerates a quintessential tea vessel into an inharmonious, tenuous tower with multiple spouts attached to its form, while pulling on romanticised memories of an abundant samovar providing tea in an Iranian household. The Farsi phrase doodool tala / golden penis is called on to playfully point to the differential treatment people are given because of body parts, and the often dysfunctional absurdity of gender roles. The way a visitor spends time with these artworks is experiential. They both require movement and a level of immersion to experience them. The risk of water spitting on you from the Golden Samovar’s fountain, the necessity to circumnavigate the light sculpture to decipher its wording.
I'm interested in your reflections on Zoë Wicomb’s writing, and can compare them to the memories of my mother and her friends. They left their country in their early twenties, too, but talk incessantly of Iran. It’s like a love affair that they never fully recovered from. A precious place and memory that they nurture in a secret corner of their hearts, and tell their children of, in a bereaving act of something lost, a sense of home; special, unique, unequal. Iran is perpetually their center, no matter how much they have been removed from it, as I think Africa is mine.
In 2022, you developed an interdisciplinary performance at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Maboneng, Johannesburg. The work, Meet Me Between Tehran and Mbabane, referenced the revolution being led by young women across Iran at the time, as well as themes of migration, identity, and belonging. I was able to witness the making of that work, and what struck me was how your visual sensibilities met with the performance-based methodologies of The Centre – how your collaborations with dancers and musicians led to the shadow-play in the work, and its overall visual and choreographic language.
David Mann:
You staged Meet Me Between Tehran and Mbabane in New York in 2023. I’m interested in what that experience was like. In South Africa, we tend to collaborate almost instinctually – it’s a way of making and thinking about creative work that feels inherent. How did the work, and the process of re-making it, change in New York?
It’s special to me that you witnessed this show develop David; it is something I am proud of. I was quite out of my comfort zone making such a detailed, performative, and choreographed piece accompanied by skilled musicians. I had ideas and gestures in my mind, stories and histories stirring within me, and the agitation of the historical moment we were witnessing. I needed to make a piece that reflected the multitudes I was experiencing, and to translate that multitude into something felt by my audience. While the piece was based on the women’s movements in Iran, it was made in South Africa, a country that has a ridiculous rate of femicide and gender-based violence. The two-wall projection at the Centre echoed the parallels women are grappling with globally. Bongile Lecoge-Zulu gifted me with deep and sympathetic listening as she helped me direct the piece at the Centre, and I feel indebted to my cast of dancers, puppeteer, musician, and the curators that I was working with on Season 9. I felt supported and cared for in a tumultuous time, as I sat at night to cut out my paper figures for the shadow work, or painted my Farsi calligraphy on the skirts that Nthabiseng Malaka designed for my show.
This work grew with me as I adapted it from Johannesburg to New York City. I was given an incredible opportunity to develop the piece at The Centre, where I had access to talented collaborators, as well as support structures that The Centre spoiled me with: costume design, lighting (central to this work), curatorial insight from Athena Mazarakis and Mandla Mbothwe, promotional materials and programming, and financial backing.
Recreating the work in New York required me to start from scratch in terms of finding collaborators, sourcing costumes, figuring out the lighting, and promoting the work. It was a tough transition, but the nesting that The Centre provided me with was a solid foundation to build from and grow the work with. I used the opportunity that NYC afforded me in terms of the diverse immigrant presence and a dedication to the arts to find collaborators who resonated with the work and who participated in remaking the piece from a place of passion and dedication. I had very limited funding to cover all the expenses, but I was supported by artists who were invested in the work, the messaging, and the meaning it provided all of us at the time. I found Iranian dancers trained in contemporary and traditional dance, who brought in their unique movements and flair. I found a gifted pianist, Shayan Azizi, who trained in classical Persian piano, worked as an ER doctor by day, and took on the role of lead musical composer in the work. He led the collaboration with Congolese musician and percussionist Nkumu Katalay, who joined the team, to create a unique soundtrack with their combined musical talents. Tina Bararian took a personal interest in the piece and grew with the work, taking over the role of monologue (from me) while perfecting the dance and gestural movements choreographed by myself, traditional Persian dance expert, Nikki Farahanchi, and Dani Criss, who specialises in West African movement.
I initially referred to the whirling Sufi dervish in the piece. I was thinking about the contested form of Vernacular Islam, which integrated traditional spirituality into mysticism, and the persecution of the Baha’i religious minority in Iran. I was inspired by the daily acts of protest in the form of dance by women on streets and subways, an act that is illegal in Iran, and in opposition to a culture that loves to celebrate. As we developed the piece for a second time in NYC, we were confronted with the news from Gaza, and again, I was inspired by dance as remonstration. Amani was a Kurdish woman and was thought to be insignificant by the state because of her minority ethnic status. We integrated Kurdish dance movements as a nod to her and other persecuted groups. Criss integrated West African Dambala movements to represent freedom and transformation, and Azizi brought in folk music, which he reimagined with pop undertones. I am so pleased with this fusion-like outcome. We included accounts of people killed by the state, starting with 10 Baha’i women at the beginning of the new government in 1983. We cited the young protestor who asked his father “not to tell mom” and upset her with the news of his execution verdict, and we ended the list with the most recent state execution, which, depending on the day of the show, could have been as recent as “yesterday,” with shadow cutouts of their faces projected on the walls in solemn silence.
In my most recent iteration of the show, I was thinking of artists who invite their audiences to participate in their work. I was desperate for community in NYC, and also wanted to hold space for my audience, many of whom were sobbing quietly in the darkness of their seats. I drew on the Persian tradition of offering tea for hospitality, and invited my audience to join us on stage and share black Persian tea, or red South African rooibos. In the middle of winter, I hoped for this gesture of warm tea to offer respite from the heaviness of the show, and encourage new friendships of bud.
I used what I learnt at The Centre to step into a leadership role, inviting artists to bring in their expertise, guiding them along a vision, and creating something new from their input and ownership of the piece. So many people go into making a project like this, it is difficult to name everyone who supported the work, especially the institutions of The Centre for the Les Good Idea, Culture Hub LIC, and Mabou Mines. It was a fulfilling process, with a ton of obstacles to work through, in the very challenging do-it-yourself city that is New York.