Clapping with Stones: Art and Acts of Resistance, 2020
The Rubin Museum, New York, USA
With its title borrowed from the opening line of a poem by the renowned thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi, My Place Is the Placeless comments on belonging and origins. The series illustrates Shahpour Pouyan’s ongoing interest in documenting his personal origins, inspired by a DNA test he took in 2014 in response to rigid perceptions of ethnic labels and identities. The test revealed Pouyan’s ties extend far beyond his native Iran to include Scandinavia, Central and South Asia, and the Middle East. The ceramic domes in this series represent each country’s remarkable architecture.
Pouyan received updates from the test in 2019, revealing discrepancies with the initial results, including a lack of ancestral ties to the Middle East. The artist documented these results with fifteen new ceramic domes that contain ash as a reminder of past histories. They represent places such as Manchuria, Korea, and the Caucasus Mountains. Pouyan’s objects reveal the paradoxical nature of returning to the idea of origins, whereby the language of art becomes a useful tool in questioning systems of power and truth.This installation is based on the first edition of the installation from 2017. I reproduced a set of 15 domes from a monumental building in countries of my genetic extraction as revealed by a genetic test. The personalized genealogy of each dome highlights the human tendency to memorialize legacies of power, just as genetic heritage is often a record of the legacies of conquest. In this version, I used the last update on my DNA test from summer 2019 to remove and add other countries to my installation.