Zeinab Shahidi Marnani Archives - The Provincetown Independent

Zeinab Shahidi Marnani

EXHIBITIONS

Materials, Microbiomes, and Metaphors

A show of works by Fine Arts Work Center fellows is a snapshot of global contemporary art

By Abraham Storer Jan 29, 2025

When the visual arts fellows at the Fine Arts Work Cetner show their work at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the community gets an exhilarating peek at what’s afoot at the studios down the street — and in the larger art world. The international mix of young artists who are in Provincetown as fellows come armed with talent, ambition, and a deep knowledge of contemporary art culture.

This winter’s exhibition, which features seven artists, is marked by a spirit of exploration with an emphasis on process and materiality. Rather than grand, bombastic visual statements, the works are decidedly lo-fi and earthy.

Covering the rear wall of the gallery is an installation of abstract images by Elena Kovylyaeva. The artist, based in Leipzig, Germany, used newsprint — a cheap, throwaway material — made from the master pages of a Risograph digital duplicator. (A Risograph is similar to the photocopiers common in offices and schools but works more like a screen printer, using spot colors in a process akin to offset printing.) In neat grids, Kovylyaeva captures what seems like the detritus of this utilitarian technology. The images are blotchy and glitchy; abstracted and overlapping; some forms are geometric, others biomorphic; the colors range from black and white to bruised purples and blues.

A detail of *Remnants* by Elena Kovylyaeva. (Photo courtesy PAAM)

Her installation cheekily reimagines abstract painting, dethroning it from its usually lofty place. These images seem to be made by accident, without an artist’s hand, yet Kovylyaeva’s arrangement of the newsprint is precise and considered. In her piece, the accidental and the intentional coalesce, offering a vision of an artist not as a singular genius but rather as one who rearranges and reanimates the scraps of culture, reimagining our understanding of art history.

Across the gallery, Dani Levine’s large-scale paintings also contend with the history of abstract painting. Her works are labor-intensive explorations of material and form, undergirded with conceptual and political concerns (her work, more than any other in the show, gestures toward grandiosity).

In Levine’s Menace, a large swirling purple form commands the center of the composition. Like Kovylyaeva, Levine is not a purist when it comes to abstract painting. She incorporates feminist and lesbian symbols, along with popular graphic styles and floral imagery. A close viewing of the painting reveals these details, along with Levine’s athletic use of materials, many of which she makes herself. The purple form is rendered with brushy, painterly excess, while the beige background is matte. A glittering silver line travels through the composition. Levine’s materials articulate the forms within the paintings, but they also exist a priori.

Edd Ravn shares Levine’s fascination with materiality. In a series of three watercolors, the constructed image is almost beside the point. Rather, the works exist more as a record of his experiments with materials like raw pigment, New York City rainwater, and nori paste, which he uses as a binder in different ratios to create effects like the washy blue passages in one painting and an impasto nipple-like form in another.

Ravn’s family has a farm in Yorkshire — his work shows a concern for natural processes. In a scattered floor installation, Ravn displays items like pheasant feathers from back home, bones, and reeds found in Provincetown. He also incorporates rubbery disk-like forms he has created through a process that involves growing microbiomes from his body. Together, the elements suggest a vision that erases boundaries between artificial and natural, scientific and spiritual. Ravn plans to change his display throughout the run of the exhibition. Like his art, the installation will embody themes of decay, growth, change, and instability.

Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, an artist from Iran, is a second-year FAWC fellow. In her lithograph prints, she uses calligraphic marks and symmetry that recall Persian art, but it seems that the Provincetown landscape has seeped into her imagination. In Manushka, an eye hovers ominously in the sky above what appear to be waves. In another image, two dome-like forms echo each other across a space that is dominated by the water, the sky, and a horizon line.

Marnani has two cubes in the exhibition that require the viewer to crouch down and peer through small holes to view an image. In Adam and Eve, the viewer’s eye is reflected and doubled on two angled mirrors. A crude painting of water on the cube’s base is also reflected in the mirrors, creating an illusion of a swirling, watery space over which the viewer’s eye hovers. It’s a clever three-dimensional representation of her two-dimensional prints, and its funhouse amateur quality adds a touch of humor.

The photo and video artists in the exhibition also forgo slick aesthetics for something that feels more homespun. Carlos Zerpa displays his video UN/SAFE on a Toshiba TV/VCR covered with wire fencing and thorns. He directed the seven-minute film, collaborating with animators and poet Karen McCarthy Woolf. The story unfolds with surprising visual and narrative twists. It addresses race, immigration, and American mythology through images that incorporate hand-drawn elements with archival footage.

Ian Page’s photographs are the most confounding works in the exhibition. In a pair of images from a project titled Election Day Wienerschnitzel, obscured dark objects foreground banal settings. In one picture shot from a car, the main subject is a bit of blue sky framed by a palm tree and the edge of a building. In the other, houseplants and a clear plastic tarp take center stage. The images evoke the placelessness of contemporary life and feel like the peripheral spaces one might get a glimpse of on a Zoom call.

Page’s other work is a sculpture. Since 03 is made from another type of detritus: wallpaper print rollers. Page arranged the rolls, which are covered with patterns of tiny pins, into a grid. Its rigid, imposing form and spiky surfaces put the sculpture in an adversarial relationship to the viewer.

*Since 03*, a sculpture by Ian Page, at the FAWC visual arts fellows show. In the background are works by Cherrie Yu (left) and Elena Kovylyaeva (right). (Photo courtesy PAAM)

Cherrie Yu’s video piece Daily Diversions encapsulates the exhibition’s spirit of improvisation. Like Zerpa’s short film, it’s a work in progress. The video features pairs and trios of women dancing in nondescript gymnasiums alongside table-tennis players engaged in games (Yu draws from her experience as a choreographer and player of table tennis in this work). The dancers’ movements are synchronized, and in some of the scenes they move while positioning and repositioning wooden boards. Their actions become a sort of living sculpture, while the table-tennis players become a metaphor for the creative process: one that’s disciplined but also responsive, dynamic, and playful.

Down to Earth

The event: The FAWC visual arts fellows’ group exhibition
The time: Through March 23
The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
The cost: General admission: $15

SEEING DOUBLE

Zeinab Shahidi Marnani’s Tricks of the Light

At FAWC, art that makes us question what we see

By Olivia Oldham Feb 28, 2024

Zeinab Shahidi Marnani’s studio on Pearl Street in Provincetown is dimly lit. In one corner sits a lounge chair with yellow pillows on it. A desk in the middle of the room is covered with clamshells painted with streaks of blue, red, and green. A book of Persian poetry lies on a side table; drawings of the moon cover many surfaces; bouquets of flowers sit in vases beside a printout of an etching of a camera obscura.

Fine Arts Work Center visual arts fellow Zeinab Shahidi Marnani works across disciplines. (Photo by Sasha Wortzel)

A series of shoeboxes are in one corner of the studio. The boxes are cardboard prototypes of Shahidi’s newest work. If you lift them up and gaze through the two holes cut in each box’s surface, you will observe a small white circle cut from paper inside the box. Try crossing your eyes, she suggests, or focus on the slits cut into the box, or ignore the slits and focus just on the circle.

Next to the shoeboxes is a piece of paper with a diagram of possible images that might arise as you warp your gaze. If you focus hard enough, you can try to conjure all the tricks of the eye listed there. You might see the circle blur and become two, or you might find that an imagined black circle hovers over the circle’s middle.

“There were moments when I realized I’m not even breathing, because I was trying to focus my eyes so much,” says Shahidi, one of this winter’s visual arts fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center. Her work will be on display at FAWC on Friday, March 8 from 5 to 8 p.m. in a group showcase with visual arts fellow Micha Patiniott and writing fellows Jack Eley and Grace Chao.

Shahidi makes art about the act of seeing: the way that light can trick you and the way that your own eyes can trick you. She does not work in one particular medium, instead roaming across documentary, sculpture, and, most recently, painting. The central feature of her work is that it turns the moment of encountering art into an experiment. It becomes a way to test your perspective.

Shahidi was born in 1983 in Esfahan, a city in central Iran. Provincetown has brought up many childhood memories, possibly because of “the nature or the isolation of the winter,” she says. She describes a memory of loving the color yellow at age 9 or 10 and believing that it held all light. She would lay a rainbow of colored pencils down and take the yellow one away, she says, laughing. The other colors looked unimpressive without it.

Shahidi studied visual communications at the University of Tehran but took many courses in the philosophy department. “I was so touched by what I learned there and didn’t expect to read such things,” she says. In particular, she loved Heraclitus. “It doesn’t sound like philosophy; it sounds more like poetry.”

After college, Shahidi began showing work in European galleries, including sculptures made for her undergraduate thesis. In 2009, she enrolled at Yale to study sculpture and began working with video there. Since then, Shahidi has alternated living in Tehran and New York.

Shahidi’s work depicts the interior of flowers and is influenced by suzani embroidery. (Photo by Zeinab Shahidi Marnani)

Shahidi’s work makes you more aware of the experience of perception: “What you decide to see is what you see,” she says. Simply sitting through beginner physics classes and learning how vision works, how light bends, and what sits beyond the night’s darkness, does not necessarily lead to noticing these phenomena in daily life. There’s knowing something, and then there’s experiencing it.

An earlier work of Shahidi’s, a documentary project titled Soliloquy, posed these questions in tangible terms. In each video, a different artist sits before a camera and describes a project that the artist is working on. After a period of time, the artists were asked to watch the previous videos of themselves, pausing them when they wanted to amend the description or talk about changes in their work.

The process of correcting their previous works was also filmed, collaged into the video, and repeated several times. These videos unearth what happens when you’re alone in a room making art. They map the timeline of an artist’s project from its beginning through its development to the time that viewers encounter the work. By asking how a single work of art can bear an endless variety of experiences and perceptions, the project mirrors the themes that run through Shahidi’s recent work about sight and vision.

An essential part of her process is stepping away from the work and allowing questions and ideas to arise naturally. “Sometimes, when you have a strong feeling about something, it’s more about the time that you spend questioning it,” she says. “With art, I question it every second. I ask, ‘Why should I even do this?’ and I take a break. Which is good for art, because it’s not just a career — it’s good to say no when you don’t have the intuition to make something.”

One of Shahidi’s newest sculptural works. (Photo by Zeinab Shahidi Marnani)

For the last seven years, Shahidi has worked as a researcher for an art collector in New York, requiring frequent travel to Central Asia to learn about suzani embroidery. An artist draws a design on the fabric, and others stitch it into place, says Shahidi. The textiles are often made specially for a woman’s wedding day. There is no plan for the design, though there are certain important symbols; instead, the artist draws from divine intuition.

One symbol that recurs in the fabrics is an open flower. The flower is “the heart of the person, how they feel inside,” Shahidi says. “They think that god is inside you, closer to yourself,” rather than something or someone you have to seek out beyond yourself.

That turning toward the body and the self for answers is at the heart of Shahidi’s work. But the artist doesn’t call it mystical. “Mystics were looking for something divine,” she says. “I’m not looking to find anything.”

And yet the art does work a certain kind of magic on our sight. “It’s magic when two becomes one,” says Shahidi, “when you have two elements in front of you, but you see just one.”

See and Be Seen

The event: A showcase with FAWC fellows Grace Chao, Jack Eley, Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, and Micha Patiniott
The time: Friday, Mar. 8, 5 to 8 p.m.
The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free

ARTISTS AND WRITERS

New Kids on the Block

20 fellows arrive at the Fine Arts Work Center

By Elias Duncan Oct 18, 2023

On Pearl Street in Provincetown, the Fine Arts Work Center’s new fellows are settling into their apartments and studios. For now, the spaces are all but empty. The white, unadorned walls of the studios are the blank canvases on which the visual art fellows will create new projects over the next seven months. A writer’s dining room table, empty except for an orchid and a bunch of bananas, is the waiting surface on which all sorts of lives will be imagined.

“It’s wonderful when the fellows finally arrive, and we show them to their studios and apartments, and they realize these beautiful, light-filled spaces are theirs for the next seven months,” says Sharon Polli, FAWC’S executive director.

FAWC awards 20 fellowships each year: 10 to writers and 10 to visual artists. Each gets an apartment, a $1,250 monthly stipend, and an entire winter to work on whatever they want, with no obligations.

Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, a multidisciplinary artist from Tehran, in her studio.

Zeinab Shahidi Marnani works in the corner of her studio, taking in the room’s grand blankness, contemplating all the big things to come. Marnani, who came to Provincetown from Tehran, is a multidisciplinary artist. She holds an M.F.A. in sculpture from Yale School of Art, is a documentary filmmaker, and is currently focused on collage.

“I appreciate being by myself; there’s no pressure,” she says, carefree but focused. “You have the time and space to work.” Her only concern going into the residency is that she will create something so large that it can’t be moved: “What if I can’t take it home?”

Tinja Ruusuvuori listens for radio waves with a kite. (Photos by Elias Duncan)

This is Tinja Ruusuvuori’s second year here. Every year, FAWC reserves four spots for returning fellows who get a special perk: choosing their own studio space. “I really wanted to hang something long, so I chose this one,” she says, looking up at the high ceilings in her studio, imagining the artwork she might create and then put up there.

The airy space is a fitting environment for a documentarian who observes and takes in everyday occurrences other people might ignore. Outside her studio, Ruusuvuori, listening for radio waves with a kite, notices a chrysalis hanging between the wooden spokes on a nearby fence. “I think it’s going to be a monarch,” she says.

Ruusuvuori says she hopes to start a radio station in the studio this winter: “People can come share whatever they want and experiment.”

David Hutcheson returns for a second year after an initial fellowship in 2017.

David Hutcheson’s apartment, one of the few that aren’t on FAWC’s Pearl Street campus, overlooks Provincetown Harbor. Hutcheson is a poet and returning fellow. He was last here in 2017, when he met his girlfriend, the poet H.R. Webster; this year, she remained in Hudson, N.Y. with their dogs.

“I didn’t write for four years, and I’ve just come back to it at the beginning of this year,” says Hutcheson. “I’m pretty hungry. I know what I want to work on, and I’m excited to get to it.”

Miguel Braceli plans to engage Provincetown’s landscape in a “community-based project” this spring.

It’s Miguel Braceli’s first time in Provincetown. “It’s like a fairytale town,” he says.

Braceli makes “public art projects,” ephemeral installations displayed out in the open, that often engage the bodies and movements of human beings as part of their design. For Braceli, the FAWC fellowship is “a good opportunity to understand a new place and to create a specific project about that place.” He plans to engage Provincetown’s landscape in a “community-based project” this spring.

As for day-to-day life, Braceli is excited to have a studio close to where he’s living. “This is an opportunity to be focused only on my work,” he says.

Molly Anders plans to complete a short story collection.

“Sorry for the floors,” says Molly Anders, standing in her otherwise pristine apartment, the largest one on FAWC’s campus. “My partner is bringing a vacuum next week.”

Although the apartment comes with a designated office space, Anders has set up her writing station in the living room, currently empty except for a few pieces of furniture and, of course, her thoughts. She’s already knee-deep in a short story collection that’s been eight years in the making. “Every time I add a story, another one falls out,” she says.

For Anders, the time and space that the fellowship provides to write isn’t a luxury but a necessity. The Kentucky native says the opportunity offers her a break from working as a journalist in England. “FAWC has always been the crème de la crème of residencies,” she says, “mostly because of the amount of time you’re given to create.”

Fellows (left to right) Grace Chao, Jack Eley, Avigayl Sharp, and Adeniyi Ademoroti walk on Pearl Street, their new home for seven months.

In the Stanley Kunitz Common Room, other fellows — mostly the younger ones — gather for an optional viewing of Mischa Richter’s documentary I Am a Town. The film, a contemplation of Provincetown’s legacy as a sanctuary for immigrants, queers, and artists, serves as a solid introduction. After the film, they’re excited — realizing they’re about to play some part in Provincetown’s storied history.

“It was cool to watch what it means to be here,” says Canadian writer Lindsay Miles, a mix of awe and apprehension in her voice. “I’m scared this is going to go by really fast.”

Beside her, Agnes Walden, a painter from New York, reflects on her new surroundings. “It’s perfect,” she says. “I feel like I’m walking on a movie set.”

Chicago writer Avigayl Sharp is still in disbelief. “I’m waiting for the ball to drop a little,” she admits. “It’s not normal to get paid to make art.”