I’m Engulfed by My Shape is another example. The piece My Mouth Is Shut, But My Tongue Is Wide Open is a response to someone telling me, “You talk too much.” But there’s also a kind of intimacy, sexuality, and eroticism in that. But I wanted it to kind of look like the thing. I didn’t want to write poetry about a peacock, although the poetry related to that piece was about a bird. The piece Blue in the Shape of Teal kind of represents a peacock. SF: My titles can be a little poetic, which I like. Image by Billi London-Gray.īLG: Your titles read like another level of wordplay to open up potential meanings. Simeen Farhat, “My Mouth Is Shut But My Tongue Is Wide Open,” 2021, cast pigmented resin, screws, 37 x 39 x 2.5 inches. It’s all people talking to each other and getting upset, saying, “No, this isn’t what you think.” And with all communication, we misread and we misinterpret. But with poetry, text messages, email, or correspondence, it’s all communication. Text messages are ubiquitous, whereas poetry is more high. Whatever is inspiring me at the time - that’s what I use. I was talking to him, metaphorically, when I started the 3D work.īut I didn’t force anything. He would talk metaphorically using poetry. But the way I jumble them up, they are not readable.īLG: How have you progressed through textual sources, from traditional poetry to emails and text messages? If you take apart the layers of words, you can read them. The poetry in it is about a candle’s flame and the energy it represents. I didn’t want the viewers to go, “Okay, just read it, this is what it is.” I wanted it to be enjoyable as an art form. So I just started making those speech bubbles as jumbled up disarrays, where they had all the sense, but I didn’t want them to be legible. Alice in Wonderland inspired me to think about the nonsense of language. It was poetic, political, illegible, political, poetic, and was inspired by philosophy and literature.
Like, “This is the shape of the language.” I started treating language as the elements and principles of design, more formally. I thought, do I need a body? Those speech bubbles became the shape and form. Image courtesy of the artist.īLG: Your work in the past decade has been more abstract. Simeen Farhat, “Blood Shot Is Blood Loved,” 2017, acrylic, site-specific. Even if you cannot speak in a public realm, your mind can still think, and you can still bring change in society. The thought is still there, the idea, the freedom to think and speak. My idea was that you can contain the female form and body, covered and everything, but you cannot control people’s thought processes. I made 3D figures that were hollow - no limbs, no facial features - but a head scarf and some text coming out of the hollow face, like babbling. SF: This idea came to me about relating the human form and language. And then it kept on evolving, and evolving, and evolving.īLG: What was the next step from these silhouettes with text? I was using those silhouettes with text from newspapers and whatever else I was listening to and reading. So, I started using silhouettes of myself, the shapes of my shadows, as if they were part of some language. I felt like I was living under the shadows of my identity. SF: Yes, I wanted to make things more explicit. I was taking text from headlines in Urdu and other sources and putting it together.īLG: Were you responding to how the political stakes were raised by that event? Then I started using a lot of political content. It started to become legible when 9/11 happened. I wondered, “What would be the context for that?” I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make my writing legible. They were representing a gesture, but it could be in any language. I was interested in hieroglyphs and language as signs and symbols, and also Lévi-Strauss, structuralism, and Saussure.
Simeen Farhat (SF): I was interested in the idea of the Tower of Babel, that languages evolve from one to another. We sat down to discuss her work in July.īilli London-Gray (BLG): How did you start working with language in your artwork? Both aspects of her work have shifted over time from the traditional to the technologically mediated. Her work with language “just evolved,” she says, from her interest in gestural marks.Īfter viewing Farhat’s current exhibition, “Scripted,” at the Grace Museum in Abilene, I was curious about the various textual sources that inspired her, as well as the development of her process. Born in Pakistan, she has resided in the United States for decades, a background that emerges in her work’s multilingual elements. Simeen Farhat is a Dallas-based artist best known for her cast-resin sculptures that combine words and letters into tangled, abstract forms. Simeen Farhat in front of her work “My Mouth Is Shut But My Tongue Is Wide Open.” Image courtesy of the artist.