Wanderer
Helia Pouyanfar

I am a conceptual artist whose work investigates the permanently transient state of the refugee body and its negotiation and reconciliation with Place. I utilize sculpture, installation, photography, print media, and writing to manifest this transient state through architectural objects, images, and videos narrating the idea of Passage and the relationship between liminal spaces and transit.

Born into a family of Kurdish descent in Iran, I moved to the United States in 2014 after living as a refugee for three years. By referencing my personal history, I am able to humanize, edify, and narrate the deeply poetic and peculiar experience of forced exile.

My interest in homes and bodily connection to Place begins by recognizing the womb-like character of the enclosed space and its nurturing qualities. What makes a home is the groundedness it offers to the body; Home is the permission to stay. Once the moment of exile arrives; however, this permission to stay gives way to a new reality for the exiled. Now Home is a metaphor that latches onto things as one moves through the world. Now Home is the decision to leave. Eventually, this uprooted sense of belonging finds solace in its permanently transient state.

This ironic redefining of Home and its transformation from a physical structure to a metaphoric concept interests me the most. My sculptures turn consistent into transient and immovable into versatile. I see architecture as the poetry of the nomad and seek to translate this nomadic relationship to Place using the dream-like power of photography. Attempting to create a narrative of my own and formed by the merging of multiple material languages, I create structures out of piles of bricks, collections of windows, series of doorways, and easily movable walls. Adding wheels, suitcase handles, or straps they become objects one can hold and carry; they become walls that travel with the body. Stripped of their original function, they are fragments independent of their origins yet longing for reunion. Within their disjointed reality, they find the freedom to roam around, travel, and act as ever-so-present haunting memories of a place that once was.

Through this process, I hope to question who gets the right to stay in one place and who gets to be forcefully removed from another. I am aware that the Western political dialogue regularly conflates homes and nations and equates the need to protect borders to the need to protect one's home. I am interested in the politicization of the threshold, both in its physical and metaphorical sense. The act of passing through space facilitated by a threshold whether it be passing through the inside into the outside, private into the public, or familiar into the foreign, is indeed a political one; a “destabilizing” political act a refugee dares to commit. I endeavor to expand the refugee experience as a holistic one where movement is circuitous; to end is to begin, and to leave is to arrive.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Helia Pouyanfar

Born in 1995 in Tehran, Iran, Helia Pouyanfar immigrated to California in 2014. Inspired by her cultural background, her architectural sculptures utilize materials such as wallpaper, suitcases, bricks, cement, doors, and windows. In an examination of passage and the relationship between liminal spaces and transit, her research endeavors to illustrate and investigate the permanently transient state of the refugee body and its negotiation and reconciliation with Place. 

She received her B.A. in Art Practice from University of California, Berkeley and her MFA in Studio Art from University of California, Davis specializing in sculpture and installation art. Pouyanfar has been the recipient of multiple awards, including the Lauren Krikorian Memorial Prize and Certificate of Excellence in Sculpture from UC Berkeley, and Mary Lou Osborn Award and the 2021 Margrit Mondavi Graduate Fellowship from UC Davis.

Her work has been exhibited at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Axis Gallery, Root Division, Southern Exposure, Worth Ryder Art Gallery, and Skirball Cultural Center. She currently resides and maintains an art studio practice in the Bay Area.

Website: heliapouyanfar.com
Instagram: @heliapouyanfar