Born in Tehran in 1982, Shirin Salehi is a visual artist, educator, and translator. She regularly teaches classes and workshops at the Center for Book Arts in New York. Living between New York and Madrid, Salehi moves through her artistic practice in three languages: English, Spanish, and Persian. Salehi’s attention to language is evident in each and every one of her works, but here I choose to take a closer look at a selection of pieces from her 2021 exhibition at Side x Side Contemporary titled Back From a Walk. The piece pictured above uses the same title as the exhibition, Back from a walk, and is made of porcelain with inscriptions in Persian.
The sculpture’s material and heft invite the viewer to peer over its surface, yet the text inscribed into it is almost illegible, due to the fragmentation of the tablet, as well as the use of a language that most people in the West––where the piece was exhibited––do not speak. This is a conscious choice. In a conversation I had with Shirin over Skype in November of 2022, she explained her use of the text to me, and I quote from a loose transcription:
Maybe one of the reasons I try to hide the texts is because, in visual works, when you work with text and the text is actually legible, the viewer will go immediately to try and decipher the meaning. The idea of not being able to read is very interesting to me because it actually creates a more intimate relationship with the viewer, because the viewer wants to know more. So there are some hints, but there’s always some sort of illegibility that remains there, and somehow it doesn’t get exhausted in the act of seeing. You can go again and again to the work and find new things in the writing.
Keeping in mind this conceptual function of illegibility, I still asked Shirin what the inscribed texts in the objects in the exhibition are––they are all variations on a poem by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, “Back From a Walk,” written during Lorca’s time at Columbia University in New York in 1929. Salehi has worked with this poem, which she translated herself from Spanish to Persian, in many of her pieces. After translating the poem, which she felt was necessary to do herself, Salehi fragments it and repeats certain fragments in English, Spanish, and Persian, until the text is quasi-unrecognizable from its original––even if one were able to read the inscriptions. We spoke about how the existing translations of Lorca from Spanish into Persian, while technically correct and adequate, did not provide the feeling of intimacy for the artist that a self-translation would.
Channeling Benjamin, Salehi says that every translation is an act of creation. To translate a text, as a poet, requires one to labor over the text, to internalize it, to make it sacred to oneself. In our conversation, Salehi revealed to me what Lorca’s poem means for her: “I’ve been working with that poem [Back From a Walk by Federico Garcia Lorca] for years and it has become something very sacred to me, and as, for example, the Romans used to etch laws on plates, or maybe sacred writings, I use poetry as that sacred language for myself” (personal interview). The state of being a foreigner who arrives in New York City––the quotidian intelligibility that it entails––drew the artist to Lorca’s verses as emblematic of this experience she wants to convey, to have the viewer embody. From Shirin’s own writing about the work on her website:
The description of his [Lorca’s] experience through the imagery of his verses was deeply close to my personal experience. The concepts of memory, concealment, and secrecy have been very significant to my practice. I created these works starting with an intimate recitation and through long periods of repetition where I inscribed the words on a multiplicity of materials ritualization the process of writing and translating it to a visual unreadable image. I have not sought the inscriptions to be read nor understood at any time, and the works try to remain faithful to the intimacy of their origin, hiding the writings through layers, sometimes literally, others conceptually.
https://shirinsalehi.com/Back-from-a-walk
This becoming-sacred, laborious re-working of a source text can be found in Bervin’s work, as well. Both of these bodies of work create an almost spiritual vibrancy, which does not lessen the conceptual interventions they both make into the realm of the bookwork. Then are these art objects, sculptures, or books––or all of the above rolled into one hybrid form? Both Bervin and Salehi invoke the book form in their uses of text that at once reveals and veils itself. Like a book lying closed on a table, these pieces house words––words that have become almost sacred for the maker––as well as aspects of the illegible.
Pictured above, this piece, titled Poems of Solitude in Columbia University IV, is inscribed with a different variation on the same Lorca poem, though this time it is much further concealed. Salehi calls this piece an artist book, explaining to me that it contains all the elements of a book: hidden, secret content inside of a cover. Displayed in this way, on the floor of a gallery space, the scroll functions as a book that can only be looked at for its objectness, and not penetrated by the interpretive gaze. The viewer can only look at it, not touch it.
