Variations

On the eve of the first showing of their collaborative work in South Africa, artists Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh speak to Alex Dodd about beauty, stereotypes and the unfathomable eroticism of abstract shapes

If knowledge is bodily, is it possible to receive ideas in orgasmic ways? Beyond our cerebral computation of quantitative “hard” facts, there is a more sensual and incarnate kind of knowing — an evolving understanding of shifting ideas and memories about people, places, contexts and power. Perhaps the transmission of these other forms of knowledge occurs in ways that are concentric, layered, fluid, multiple — like a female orgasm. These are my speculations as I head down Loop Street to rendezvous with artists Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh, who have just touched down in blazing Cape Town from subzero New York.

When absorbing the floral and fecund surfaces of their work, the last thing that comes to one’s mind is snow. Their mixed-media drawings hum with an interplay of hibiscus red, translucent blues and woozy pastel plains of fleshy pink, offset by intensities of jazzy yellow. Mouths and bodies tangle together in an evanescent field of desire. The stitched outlines of seductive lovemaking or masturbating women pop out from overlays of pattern and liquid washes of dripping colour. Blooming petals and flourishing leaves simultaneously reveal and conceal voluptuous shapes of rounded rumps and pert, ample breasts, human and plant bodies tangling together in a miragelike dialectic of sex.

The atmosphere is slow, tropical and steamy — a hothouse of proximity and possibility. So it’s no surprise that the sixth-floor studio Amer and Farkhondeh share on 151st Street and Broadway in Harlem gets a lot of sun.

“We’re not far from the Presbyterian Hospital, so it’s the usual New York cliché of honking, firefighter sirens and ambulances,” says Farkhondeh in an accent that blends Farsi, French and New York English. “We often hear police cars because we’re two blocks away from the precinct. We also hear lots of music in the area — especially in the summer — because it’s a Dominican neighbourhood and the people love merengue [dance music]. Everything happens outside on the boulevard — people playing checkers, cars playing music so loud they’re shaking, and sometimes there are small disputes in the neighbourhood.”

Yet when the two artists are in the process of initiating a new series of collaborative works, it generally happens in silence. “We don’t actually communicate by spoken words. I’ll do some drawings on paper and then Ghada can take whatever she likes or is inspired by to work on. And vice versa.”

Farkhondeh was born in Iran and studied in Tehran, Nice and Paris. It was at art school at the Villa Arson in Nice in 1988 that he met Amer, who had moved with her family to France from Cairo, where she was born.

They both moved to New York in 1996 and started working together almost by accident when, in 2000, after a period of immobilising depression, Farkhondeh turned to his good friend for support, moving into Amer’s studio.

Without her permission or consent, he intuitively began adding layers of paint to Amer’s canvases and drawings. At first, Amer was shocked by her friend’s uninvited interventions and became increasingly intrigued by his additions to her works in progress and began to encourage the visual dialogue.

“Collaboration is a mutant riddle. It is a type of creation that resists control,” says Amer.

They coined the moniker RFGA (Reza Farkhondeh, Ghada Amer) as their joint signature and continued their collaborations in tandem, while simultaneously sustaining their individual practices. Farkhondeh brings his open-ended investigations into the forms and beauty of nature to Amer’s explicit explorations of female sexuality.

In addition to mixed-media works on paper, their current exhibition, which opened at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town this week, features their first series using a new material — a synthetic fabric called Pellon. This absorptive cloth bears the random traces and stains of liquid pigment and pulp that has dripped through in the paper-making process.

“We worked on the front and the back of the Pellon so that it shows traces that you would never have if you traced directly in the front,” says Amer. “We wanted these traces to be a bit vague or obscure.”

Last year, Amer was honoured by the Smithsonian Museum of African Art alongside South African artist Mary Sibande for the potency of her art, which “confronts globally relevant issues of gender, identity, inequality, access, privilege and power”. Her embroidered surfaces feature fragmented erotic imagery sourced from pornographic magazines like Hustler and Club.

“I thought embroidery was a good medium to speak about women,” she has said. “As a child I used to help my mother make dresses. In Egypt at the time it was expensive to buy alreadymade clothes … It was an activity where women would gather and sew together — my mother and all of her female friends, my grandmother, the grandmothers of all the neighbours of our house.”

Like Sibande, whose work draws on her female ancestral power line, Amer’s work is born of a domestic medium imbued with matrilineal inheritance.

Both Amer’s individual works and the collaborative pieces she makes with Farkhondeh lend themselves to ready circulation in the hashtag era of #MeToo and #TimesUp. They are immediately eye-catching, bold and appealing. They do not resist beauty. This makes them very transmissible and viral, but when you start to look more closely, to delve into the layers and ponder the meanings behind the titles, there’s no end to the possibilities they bring into play. Histories and meanings emerge from the layers the deeper in you get.

Both artists have made works that explicitly explore the mysterious interplay of text and image, and the titles of this collaborative series are full of eroticism, provocation, politics and wit: Madame de Pompadour; Esther, Queen of Persia; Portrait of