'Shirazeh Houshiary | No Borders, No Boundaries' – Flaunt Magazine

16 September 2024

Shirazeh Houshiary is concerned with the minutiae of our existence. In hands-on form, the Iran-born artist adroitly biologizes an epistemology we’ve long deduced to organized, categorical forms. Instead of ignoring the great philosophical questions of time and space, she patiently uncovers the feelings that arise when we allow natural processes to coexist with our questions of place in a vast endlessness. Through this hybridity, Houshiary opens a portal to a new world in her exhibition, The Sound of One Hand, on view at Lisson Gallery this fall.

When I speak with Houshiary about the exhibition, our conversation is rather mimetic of the art itself. Piece by piece, layer by layer, molecule by molecule, we peel the exhibition of its individual boundaries, moving through the functional appendages of The Sound of One Hand until they are all but collections of molecules, coalescing around some faint gravitational core.

First, we speak of “Enchanter” (2024). Houshiary cites carbon particles as the referential basis of the piece—each particle linked in a solemn cooperation of the natural process. One of the largest pieces in the exhibition, “Enchanter” establishes the basis of our position in our viewership and in the universe. Houshiary concisely draws these parallels in the scale and size of the piece: we are enveloped into the natural world because we exist within it. As the viewer moves toward the piece, however, one observes an even more miniscule natural process at work, mimicking cells and their microchemistries. She explains, “Humanity has lost connection with what I call deep time. I have tried to bring that into my work and to my own psyche in the way that I spend my life and connect to the natural world, to the way that nature works and to the way that I am part of this planet. I’m not an isolated being. And if art has any purpose right now, for me, the biggest purpose of making art is in educating myself and cultivating the self.”