24 Oct ODL Fellow Rashin Fahandej in ICA Biennial James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition
ODL Fellow Rashin Fahandej’s project “A Father’s Lullaby” is currently featured in the 2019 installment of the ICA biennial James and Audrew Foster Prize exhibition highlighting the work of Boston-area artists. Fahandej is one of four 2019 Foster Prize winners, an intergenerational group of artists working across media including painting, sculpture, film, and video to explore questions of place, portraiture, and belonging.
“A Father’s Lullaby” is a multi-platform, multi-year community-engaged project that investigates and reflects on the issue of mass incarceration and how it impacts lower-income communities, particularly communities of color. The project is a collaborative exploration of this issue that highlights the role of men in raising children and underlines the absence of fathers due to racial disparities of mass incarceration and its direct impact on children, women, and lower-income communities.
In a studio visit with the ICA, Fajandej explains that the multi-faced installation consists of three different layers. The first layer includes a 26 minute encounter with various lullabies, narratives, and stories, starting with a graph of the trend of incarceration from 1925 to 2015. To create this part of the piece, Fahandej asked community members to share lullabies and memories of their own childhood.
The second layer of the installation includes three touch panels which Fahandej consider to be part of a “deep witnessing space”. To activate the portrait documentaries in the panels, the visitor must consciously decide to sit down to listen to those narratives and stories, and can only hear them when touching the panel and activating the space.
The third layer of work is an online participatory component where visitors are invited to become a part of the growing movement by sharing lullabies and stories and giving a voice to the social challenge of mass incarceration. These personal stories can be listened to and shared at fatherslullaby.org.
About what inspires her work, Fajandej states, “What motivates my artistic practice is my life investment in social justice. I interrogate oppressive systems to give voice to marginalized narratives and personal stories, and to propagate poetic expressions of local and global perspectives. My approach to artmaking is deeply informed by my passion for social justice and my personal experience as a woman and a member of persecuted Baha’i minority in Iran, as an immigrant in Boston, and as an educator. I consider my art a voice for the margins communicated through the poetry of visuals.”
“A Father’s Lullaby” can be viewed at ICA Boston until December 31st, 2019.
Images courtesy of Rashin Fajandej and ICA Boston.