With a journey quite different from most art school students, we check in with Cariz Nordlöf who left a promising career in medicine to pursue one in art. Zooming in on the present, she's currently presenting her BFA degree show "Jag vek ihop natten / شب را تا کردم" at Galleri Konstfack.
Reinforcing Body, performance, 2021, Centrifug Konsthall C
C-P: Hello Cariz, congrats on your BFA degree show "Jag vek ihop natten / شب را تا کردم (I Folded the Night)". With words being a part of your practice, I’m not surprised by the evocative title. Tell me a little about it, and also the beautiful poem that makes part of the show.
C.N: Thank you! And thank you for having me and expanding the space for contemplating my exhibition.
Each of my artworks in my BFA solo emerges from deep sorrows, losses and longings. When I work I feel free to explore that darkness without being restrained on how, when and the quantity. I try to position myself in the middle of the darkness and I find that there are a lot of topics coated in endless darkness. Meanwhile, there is a lot of joy in the process such as finding forms, sketching, welding etc. The beginning is although always a compact darkness. I started reading Forugh Farrokhzad’s book “Another Birth and other poems” and I found courage to express my poem as well as having a poetic approach to the title. In the title I tried to intertwine my own perception of the darkness and it felt accurate to use the word “night” instead of darkness. “Night” commands an aspiration after an equilibrium between darkness and light. The word also implies that the morning light will return no matter how dark it is. To increase the opacity of the night I felt an urge to fold it. First then it felt comparable with the darkness that I personally can feel but also to reflect on the ongoing darkness in the world.
In Physics some talk about the possibility to travel through time by using so called wormholes, which requests that spacetime is folded. What happens if darkness is folded, where will one travel? To project the idea of folding and time traveling on the sculptures themselves, the sound has been a topic I have been interested in for a while. One can also approach the title as folding away the darkness and reshaping it to a very small form. Almost as if it had disappeared. To create a title where other people can enter it from different angles is of importance to me.
Words taking the shapes of prose, poems and fragmented sentences are a big part of my practice. With that said it has so far just stayed in the process and to my solo it is the first time that I transfer the poem to the actual exhibition space. The poem in this exhibition is published in a folder, printed on common printing paper. The trace after an act of folding will always be left due to the shape of a folder. The Persian poem and the Swedish one are pushed to the edges of the paper and in the middle there is a huge amount of empty space. I am interested in empty spaces and find them very much crowded since that is where everything can actually expand. The emptiness in the folder is an entrance, a transformation, a place for expanding. I am not comfortable with calling it a space in between since that expression may diminish one's self. I think about it not as “in between” something but instead as a place existing of itself and not compared to each other. When folding the paper the letters and words from the different languages will rest upon each other as well as carry each other. They can be read separately but they will definitely give a sense of completeness with each other. None of them is a translation of the other.
C-P: You and I first met years ago through a mutual friend. You were working as a medical doctor at the time and I had yet to really work in the arts. Fastforward some years, and here you are at Konstfack by way of Gelersborgsskolan. I’ve mentioned you in conversations with friends as I find your foray into the field very inspiring and in ways I guess not too different from mine. What finally prompted you to leave Medicine?
C.N: Thank you Koshik for describing it as inspiring, that means a lot. This is still a difficult and personal topic. I will try to share some of it. The turning point came after I got seriously sick and couldn’t move or eat. I searched for a glimpse of light and I used all the energy I had left to release my body and mind that had been captured since childhood. My brother Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is an artist and he was always the light during my period that I studied and worked as a medical doctor. He brought me to exhibitions and short films and broadened my perspectives on life. In order to survive I needed to leave the medical practice. And step by step I started to live again. I have always been interested in writing and poetry so my brother suggested applying to Gerlesborgskolan to spend time in a space where I could explore my artistic practice further in different ways. And suddenly my poems and writings started to convert to performances, installations, sounds and videos. By delicate guidance particularly by the artist Mar Fjell, who is a teacher at Gerlesborgsskolan, I continued to explore the artistic field. Lina Selander, Anna-Karin Rasmusson and Ida Lundén are teachers that have meant a lot to my artistic practice in the last years at Konstfack.
C-P: I’ve had the pleasure of following you on and off for a while and I’m impressed by how diverse your practice is. We spoke about it a little briefly the other day, but your appetite and curiosity really shines through and I guess also makes sense given your background. I’m quite sure the show you are presenting could have manifested itself very differently. What were some of the considerations that went into it?
C.N: Yes, I am very curious and the different mediums brings me so much happiness. I reflect on the mediums such as needing to breathe in different ways and directions since art is to me parallel to everything I do. The materials used in my solo exhibition are very much precisely picked. The sculptures made of rebars derive from an installation and performance in 2021 named "Reinforcing body" at Centrifug Konsthall C, where I worked out with the rebar for one hour each exhibition day. Just as I was going through a lot of personal transformations I approached the rebar nets as a material that would transform into sculptures. Rebars are not supposed to reshape, they are used to hold buildings and to prevent them from collapsing. I wanted them to collapse so I cut it all into pieces and started to create these sculptures. The form of each sculpture resonates to the act of folding and creating the possibility to travel through time. I have been doing a lot of research and have been reading from “Tiden är bara ett ord: om klockornas mark och hur man bryter den” by Lennart Lundmark, “A Geography of Time” by Robert b. Levine, “A brief history of time” by Stephen Hawking and watched parts of Lynn Tjernan Lukkas video works “Telling Time”. I want to challenge the perception of a straight timeline and create a space for parallel times to exist. I think time is an element in question to understand the physics of the world but the time used in society is very different from how one perceives it. I don’t want time to make me blind.
The choice of aluminum is me trying to expand and explore other materials that I am drawn to. In Iran the aluminum industry is huge and pots, plates and glasses of this material are very common. There are a lot of challenges to work with this soft and sensitive material but my supervisors in the metal workshop Jonas Majors and Emille de Blance guided me. I folded the aluminum but in order to do that the machine requested one’s body to also be folded. Finally, creating a soundscape has been in my practice since my first installation at Gerlesborgsskolan and I feel it is interesting to explore the sculptural aspect of sound through the lens of time traveling.
C-P: Performance, poetry and sound notably all make part of your practice and are also represented in (connection to) the show. You presented a performance on the opening night which I sadly missed. Tell me about it, what did I miss?
C.N: I thought about the performance as an act of activating the exhibition but also to challenge myself and the sculpture called “Badbezan”. When building the sculpture I realized that it is dancing and I really wanted it to dance during the vernissage. I connected a contact microphone to the sculpture and played on “Badbezan” with a smaller fan made of rebars and mosquito net. In the beginning of the performance I used the rhythm of the poem as a guide on how to play but as I was playing the moment got quite intense and the sound of the sculpture guided me instead. I finished the performance by reading the poem in Persian. Most of my audience during the performance didn’t speak Persian but I think that evokes questions such as “when do we know a language?”, “What does a language consist of?” or “How can language change?”
C-P: I met you just before the summer as I had just returned from South Korea and you were about to take off to Japan for a few weeks. Please share some words on your trip and also the fascinating connections you’ve made between Iran and Japan.
C.N: Yes, so thanks to funding from Konstfack a trip to Japan was simplified. My application considered recording sounds in Japan from different sites. In the 90’s a sound archive was created as a movement against sound pollution and I found this very compelling. When visiting Japan I got a much deeper understanding of the archive since one is exposed to sounds almost everywhere. Even when hiking in the forest at Mt Maya in Kobe the melody of the cable railway approaching echoed everywhere. The recordings of crickets in Kobe are included in the sound piece at my BFA solo. I’m trying just as in the sculptures to construct a sculptural soundscape where one can travel through time. When writing the application I also looked further into the relationship between Japan and Iran. As a child I spent every summer vacation in Karaj, Iran, and we watched a lot of Japanese series. I wanted to explore that connection further. The trading between the two countries is also ongoing and this has been continuing even after the revolution in 1979. One reason is that Japan has an ambition to not let the western culture influence them. What stayed with me is that the fabric used to make chadors in Iran has been designed in Japan. Visiting Japan also made me meet Iran again but through the lens of another country. I think this has influenced my practice more than I expected.
C-P: With graduation around the corner (-ish), what’s coming up for you?
C.N: I was invited last spring by the splendid curator students Ruxoi Gao and Noël Platts to exhibit in the “pool area” that is an outdoor space at Accelerator. Curator students at Stockholm University and Accelerator collaborate once in a while. In this artwork I have been working with salt and aluminum and returned to explore topics about the environmental impact on the Karun river in Iran. The interest of working with the Karun river derived already in 2022 when I made a sound and performance piece in Motala about Göta Kanal. The Old Motala Factory was sending bridges to Iran and one of the bridges, “The white bridge”, runs over the Karun river in Ahvaz.
Also, fingers crossed, some of my sculptures from my BFA solo will be shown in Uppsala, our mutual hometown. Since everything is still not set I will not relieve any more details on location and time. Anyway, I think it’s beautiful that the sculptures will travel to my hometown and I cannot avoid a feeling of completeness for the sculptures.
/Koshik Zaman
All images courtesy of the artist.
Reinforcing Body, performance, 2021, Centrifug Konsthall C
2. بادگیر (Eng. Windcatcher)
3. بادبزن (Eng. Fan)
4. Rumtid (Eng. Spacetime)
5. Portrait by Inês Varandas Pereira (MA2 student at Konstfack)
6. Untitled