Farieda Nazier
22 May – 18 June 2023
Farieda Nazier worked on two projects during her residency. The first, Cleave the Earth Asunder (2023), is a series of press-moulded terracotta, unfired sculptures, with glaze and wood, that was installed within NIROX Sculpture Park. “Cleave the Earth Asunder deepens the exploration of dehumanisation, whereby humans were (and are) considered property – either as objects, fauna or flora,” explains Nazier. “It considers the notion of ‘womxn as flora’ and begins to unpack the impact of this on the gendered body. The womxn’s body objectified as a potential life-giving receptacle, is explored here through the metaphor of pod and seed. The interchangeable images of seedpods and bodily orifices (yoni, vulva, anus and lips) create a visual of violent ‘cleaving’ or splitting apart. However, the violence here is disrupted by the notion of the body as a powerful conduit for creation, ecstasy and transcendence. The complex nature of cleavage is considered here as unfettered, wholly natural and universal: violently creating both pleasurable and painful.”
Titled The Spectacle Lure (2023), Nazier’s second body of work – considered a companion to the installation – is a performance or “spectre”, adopting upholstered fabric, found objects, seed beads, embroidery, and a wooden plinth. As per the artist statement, the work “speaks to historical and contemporaneous commodification of the body. The work relocates social media, in particular Reality TV, as a neo-liberal extension of the age-old Human Zoo or Freak Show prominent between the 1840s and the 1920s. Reality TV is now normalised, and in many instances feed into notions of voyeurism and the consumption of the other; the weird, extraordinary, and grotesque. Today’s Western heteronormativity is closely tied to the body politics of othering, eugenics and race. My work speaks to the perpetuation of othering, and how social Darwinism has become hidden in plain sight. The ‘Freak Show’ trope, now more accessible than ever via social media platforms, is a new technocratic way in which oppressors profit through dehumanisation and colonialism.”
The performance was filmed and later included in an exhibition, alongside the garment worn, in NIROX’s Screening Room.
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Farieda Nazier is a Johannesburg-based artist, educator, and activist. For the past ten years, Nazier has been employed at the University of Johannesburg, where she was recently (2016) promoted to a senior lecturer position. As a lecturer, her duties included course and module coordination, teaching, researching and community engagement. Subsequently, in her capacity as Head of Department and senior lecturer (Jewellery Design and Manufacture) Nazier’s responsibilities included strategic leadership and alignment of the departmental academic and operational procedures to a critical art and design educational paradigm.
As a creative practitioner who employs visual arts, performance and craft making as a means to disrupt and subvert, her work explores the psychological and perceptible consequences of historical legacies and how these are intimately interconnected to socio-political contexts. She employs provocative installations and performance to engage in discursive opportunities within her practice, amongst publics and within her educational praxis. Nazier has successfully curated and participated in a number of art exhibitions, both locally and abroad. Most recently (2021), she exhibited The Posterity Project at the Castle of Good Hope (Cape Town) and The Forge (Johannesburg). Her work has also been on show at the 56th Venice Biennale in Venice and at the FNB Art Fair (Johannesburg) in 2015. In March of the same year, Nazier was invited to present her research at Principia College (Elsah, USA), MCLA (Williamstown, USA) and the prestigious Williams College (Williamstown, USA). Her research and writing appears in a broad scope of publications which ranges from academic peer-reviewed journals such as the international Education as Change journal to educational books such as the Cambridge Rainbow Readers series.
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