Storytelling, in the artistic practice of Mobina Nouri, is a matter of connecting ancient wisdom absorbed from her own Persian culture to her personal experiences in the modern world. In her “A Thousand Tales’’ series, the artist draws from the meta-fictions embedded within Middle Eastern folklore and, through tender and densely detailed hand-drawings outlined in ink upon canvas, transposes them into a place where they might articulate both intimate and universal contemporary terrain.
“A Thousand Tales” is a solo exhibition of large-scale works by Mobina Nouri where each piece in this richly detailed body of work explores tales relayed by Shahrazād, the speaker from the famed Middle Eastern epic “One Thousand and One Nights”. Her meandering stories navigate complex territories, crossing geographies and cultures while negotiating love, tragedy, comedy, and erotica. It is from these layered tales within tales that Mobina builds the framework of her universe: an intricately spun tapestry of folklore interwoven with beads of ancient wisdom, ubiquitous narratives, surreal, vaguely familiar figures, and an abstract power somehow binding discordant chaos into a harmonious whole.
Nouri travels through time, interjecting her own surreal elements and supernatural beings into these visions that span increasingly elaborate tales. Interweaving unexpected elements from Western and contemporary cultures such as The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli and African Bush Elephant (2020) by Crystal Morey, Nouri conjures up alternative realities. Her stories take place in a dream moment, a coming together of layers rather than linear movement through time, greeting viewers as they exist in the here and now.
It is Mobina Nouri’s first solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based Iranian contemporary art platform Advocartsy in the United States. The interrogation of the status of women is a recurrent theme throughout the artist’s work. Recalling the powerful dichotomy of the icon in mythology and divination, blindfolded women gracefully glide throughout her constructed universe, simultaneously symbolizing the burden of patriarchy women bear, as well as the strength they are forced to cultivate as a means to survive it.
Here, through the imposition of empowered female figures Nouri charters not only the supreme wisdom of the storyteller, Shahrazād, but also succeeds in destabilizing gender roles through her figurative scenes that depict women engaging with traditionally masculine tasks.
Nouri invites the viewer to seek out hidden details, guiding and surprising them as they focus on various microcosms, only to step back to realize the situation in its entirety. Her characters – humans, animals, and natural elements – finely mapped out in ink, converge to form an ecosystem and are, as chaos theorists contend, unavoidably and symbiotically linked.
A Thousand Tales
Advocartsy’s West Hollywood gallery, Los Angeles
From February 19th to July 31st 2022
Edit by Adele Allen