On 25 November 2024, during Orange the World Day 2024, the worldwide campaign to stop violence against women, Rotterdam alderman for Care Ronald Buijt, announced plans for an extraordinary and unique monument. The sculpture will be realised by visual artist Narges Mohammadi and is to be placed in a prime location, on Rotterdam’s Coolsingel. BKOR and SIR are now proud to reveal its design.
The strength of your work includes linking your personal story to important, current social issues. In light of the new artwork you are about to realise, could you say a bit more about that?
Narges Mohammadi: “My work stems from my personal history, shaped by experiences from two very different cultures. Yet it touches on something bigger, something we all share, something that exists both inside and outside us. The political is personal, and the personal is political. What happens in society affects us all, in one way or another. In the end, I am only an artist. I can only make tangible what is happening inside me. I think when you have experienced something like that, you have a different relationship to the work and the way you express it. Objects from my own memory become symbols that stand for something much bigger than myself. They relate to the memories of others. By offering openness, I hope to invite others to make space for similar feelings – of sadness, fear and powerlessness, but also of hope and longing. It’s almost a way of saying, ‘It’s OK. If I can do it, so can you.’ By no means do I mean this in a pedantic way, but rather as a way of giving strength.”
In previous artworks such as Passing Traces, you play with the contrast between the presence and absence of objects through hollowing out. What meaning do you place in this?
Narges Mohammadi: “In Passing Traces (2020), I first thought about ‘negative space’ – the air around objects with a solid form. It was too difficult to directly shape the emotional void after the loss of a loved one. When someone is no longer there, their absence continues in everything: in sound, in the air, in physical matter, but also slowly in your memories and in every future thought. Reflecting on this, I discovered that shaping the space around objects was the only way to make the absence tangible. So I shaped the air around a chair and left out the chair itself. I make emptiness a carrier of meaning. You only really miss something or someone when you experience their physical absence.
With my work, I want to draw attention to that which you would rather forget, that which is deeply hidden or invisible – that which you yourself may not want to be there. As someone who had a
difficult childhood, I know what it feels like to be invisible. Because of our flight history, I couldn’t go to school until I was eight. Making art has become a way for me to live, to exist. It allows me
to explore and observe the world with an almost childlike eye, to question what we take for granted. This is how I try to create space for introspection, change and growth.”
Because of the grandeur and materiality (halva, clay) of your artworks, they quickly take on a monumental character. What significance do size and material have in your work, the new memorial in particular?
Narges Mohammadi: “Indeed, my art is often large in scale: I work with 700 kilos of halva, tonnes of concrete and hundreds of kilos of clay. I cannot do something like that alone. In the beginning, collaboration was a necessity, but now it has become an essential part of my practice, something in which I continue to deepen. Although my work often has a monumental character, I use materials that everyone is familiar with, can handle or that are easy to work with. It is precisely this monumentality that makes the work enter into a physical relationship with the body; you have to relate to it. This certainly applies to the new artwork, in which all the different parts are based on lifelike dimensions. The ‘artwork handbag’, for instance, has exactly the dimensions of a real handbag – it has not been enlarged or made smaller. By doing this, I hope to reduce the distance between the artwork and the viewer. In a way, I am saying: this can also be your bag. You too, or someone close to you, may face directly or indirectly unsafe situations, such as domestic violence or gender-based violence.”
Publicatiedatum: 06/03/2025