The mountainous landscape surrounding Tehran and the damage the U.S. has inflicted on Iran's capital shaped artist Leila Seyedzadeh's recent pieces depicting her upbringing and pain of being far from home.
The New York-based Iranian artist hasn't been home in nine years. In the middle of her artist-in-residence program at Shangri La Center for Cultures & Ideas and Museum of Islamic Art in February, the U.S. military launched air strikes on the country, damaging a number of historical monuments and sites. The conflict has now made it complicated for Seyedzadeh to visit her family.
“It is so tough, especially right now, because there are so many difficulties. Sometimes I feel like it's impossible,” she said. “But then when I'm making art, I feel like I have ownership and I can create the thing that I really long for.”
That longing to be connected to her home is captured in her exhibit “Birds in Search of Blue Expanses” at Shangri La's Moroccan Gallery, facing makai to O‘ahu's south shore. It brings together paintings, weaving, sculpture and poetry, alongside historic works from the museum's collection.
Museumgoers will encounter a landscape that appears to float in the air. Woven paintings hang from the ceiling that imitate mountains, water and fragments of color. They appear and disappear depending on where the viewer stands.
The woven centerpiece was created partly in New York and in Hawai‘i, folded into a suitcase and flown across the ocean for the exhibit. Seyedzadeh said it reflects her immigrant experience moving from one place to another.
“Similar to my lifestyle as an immigrant, I can fold the textiles in a suitcase and carry it wherever. I'm going to the other side of the ocean and install it. Then as I'm gone, the work is gone, too.”
Her painting process is meticulous. Seyedzadeh painted directly onto the individual threads before weaving them together. As the threads crossed, the original image broke apart and then reemerged as something new.
It differs from dyeing the material — usually using natural materials like indigo, pomegranate peel or turmeric — a skill she learned from her mother, who also taught her sewing and mending.
“I decided to experiment with something new, and basically produce my textile, rather than dyeing it,” she said. “But it was interesting that I could sort of use a material that I can paint on it, and then weave it, which was very appealing. Because I felt like I'm weaving my paintings, and eventually turning it into a sculptural installation.”
When Seyedzadeh thinks of her mother, her memories go back to when she was 13 watching her mom dye colors onto recycled fabric like clothes, sheets and curtains. She started to use dye in 2015 while working with her mother in their backyard in Iran. She made her first art installation in their garage. She remembered the pigmented hands she and her mother shared from working on it together.
“That was the moment that I felt a whole knowledge and skill was transferred from my mom to me,” she said.
From being surrounded by mountainous terrain in Tehran then migrating to the flat lands of the East Coast of the U.S., Seyedzadeh tells her story through art.
She said landscapes aren't just something people look at. It's also a way of remembering where people come from.
The woven landscapes aren’t presented alone in the exhibit. They're surrounded by the architecture and collection at Shangri La, including fragments of tiles and Persian carpet.
The idea of including the tiles came from Seyedzadeh watching videos of historic sites damaged in Iran. She saw tiles break off the walls and crumbled on the ground.
Some of the tiles in the exhibit are the same ones that come from the city Isfahan, where some of the historic tiles were damaged in Iran, according to Navid Najafi, the exhibit curator and associate director of programs and social practice at Shangri La.
“It's present in that exhibition, but in a subtle and pretty profound way,” he said.
“Birds in Search of Blue Expanses” wasn't the original title. It changed after Seyedzadeh saw the Indigenous white-tailed seabird koaʻe kea. She was amazed by how close the native bird flew toward an active volcano.
She said that the bird aspect of the exhibit has more to offer, so she created a sculpture of that very seabird. It symbolizes her being an immigrant.
In Persian mythology, birds are a common symbol, and people who are traveling or migrating are referred to as birds in Iran, according to Najafi.
“The title (of the exhibit) doesn’t suggest simply a journey toward one final destination,” he said. “It's about movement, it's about orientation and learning to inhabit more than one perspective. Through this experience, the artist was able to learn more about themselves."
For Seyedzadeh, the landscapes in the exhibit aren’t meant to represent one place. It's about what happens when memories of one landscape meet a new one and how both can exist at the same time.
“I'm carrying my homeland within me, within the textiles that I'm creating,” she said.
The exhibit is on display until February 2027.
