cube is NOT geometric, 2022

Women, Life, Freedom project

Solo Exhibition, Mercury 20 Gallery

In Cube Is NOT Geometric, I use video, animation, wall drawing, and sculpture to investigate the cube as both a geometric form and a cultural symbol. Rather than treating it as a perfect mathematical object, I approach it through the intertwined lenses of memory, religion, politics, and identity.

The project draws on my upbringing in post-revolutionary Iran, where science education was inseparable from religious ideology. Here, the cube is both a geometric form and a religious object, referencing the Kaaba—the Muslim holy site whose name literally means “cube” in Arabic.

Developed during a 2022 residency at MASS MoCA and inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Distorted Cubes, the installation took on new meaning later that year during the Women, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini. I created Naked Cube, incorporating donated hair from women in the San Francisco Bay Area as an act of solidarity. The work became both a personal reckoning and a collective expression of resistance, where geometry serves as a language through which memory, power, and freedom are negotiated.

Contorted Shadows, three handmade wood cube sculptures, each 12 x 12 x 12 inches, charcoal wall drawings (eight-point stars extracted from the Topkapi scroll), shadows, and hair, 2022.

Three cube sculptures hold charcoal drawings, two of which are the eight-point stars from the Topkapi scroll. While the cubes are perfect, their distorted, elongated shadows on the wall, in various shades, are reminiscent of LeWitt’s Distorted Cubes. The black center in Cube ii symbolically represents the Kaaba, and its net the Christian cross.

Naked Cube, hand-made wood cube sculpture (30 x 30 x 30 inches), tulle veil (10 feet),  hair, fabric, steel rods, and shattered glass

I stitched each donated piece of hair to a black cone-shaped fabric where the hair reveals itself from the narrow bottom end, as a metaphor for the struggle, freedom, and ultimately the agency over bodily autonomy that Iranian women demand. The hair pieces are installed inside an open black cube structure, referencing the Kaaba, laid on broken glass pieces, with a 10-foot-long veil hanging over them from the ceiling, exposing both Iranian women’s struggle and bravery. Naked Cube is dedicated to Iranian women, and my cousin, Sadaf, who was cornered and beaten by the morality police during a protest on October 9th in Shiraz, Iran.

Harvested Braid, a collaboration with Svetlana Gous, 14 feet, October 2022

Videos & Stop-Motion Animation

Disposable Cube, four multi-screen videos, 1:30, 2022

The four multi-screen videos with sound show me at MASS MoCA, playfully engaging with my handmade paper cube in front of Sol LeWitt’s wall paintings. Outside the museum, I circumambulate the square grids and the cube, a quiet ritual that ends unexpectedly. LeWitt’s works feature geometric shapes and eight-pointed stars, motifs commonly found in Iran’s historic religious architecture, significant for their innovative representation of complex mathematical designs. By kicking the cube, I symbolically reject the geometry and the “distorted views” imposed on me because of my birthplace, while also protesting my lived experiences as an Iranian woman in post-revolutionary Iran. The piece serves as an homage to Sol LeWitt’s Distorted Cubes and explores the intersections of cultural identity, scientific and artistic achievements, and their collision with politics and theocracy.

Two videos were taken and monitored by Patricia M. Brace at Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, June 2022
Two videos were recorded at MASS MoCA grounds by Pantea Karimi, North Adams, MA, June 2022.
Permission for filming at Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at MASS MoCA’s mill building was granted by the Sol LeWitt Estate in 2022.

A Preludial Implosion, stop-motion animation, 31 seconds, 2022

This stop-motion animation draws on Plato’s Timaeus (c. 360 B.C.), in which each Platonic solid is associated with a classical element, with the cube representing the Earth. It presents two side-by-side stop-motion animations set in different contexts. Using my handmade paper cubes, I explore the intersections of cultural identity, history, and their collision with politics and theocracy. One cube symbolizes cultural identity and scientific endeavor, featuring a twelve-pointed star pattern derived from a late Medieval Iranian scientific document, juxtaposed with a black cube referencing Malevich’s 1915 Black Square as a “sacred icon.” In the video, the cultural cube is shot and destroyed. I created the stop-motion animation using 100 photos of the cube, captured in 1-centimeter increments from the moment it is “shot” to its destruction.

Staged Circumambulation, Video performance, Nov 19, 2022
Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA.   Performers: Martha S., Mel D., Jordan K., Tara D., Jennifer L., Victoria H., Danielle W.

Six of the videos of volunteer women cutting their hair

Volunteer women who donated their hair:
Dr. Ladan, A.  (Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at The San Diego Museum of Art ), Dr. Persis, K. (Neda Nobari Distinguished Chair, Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies @San Francisco State University), Summer B.,   Heather W.,   Joelle B.,    Jordan K.,   Valerie B.,   Sahba S.,  Mahsa V.,   Roya P.,   Anahita B.,   Sara A.,    Fariba B.,   Arezou P.,  Hamideh G.,   Sara T.,   Junko T.,   Johanna P.,  Jennifer L.,   and    Victoria H.

The 10th-century poet Ferdowsi in Shahnameh: Book of Kings, referred to the hero Siavash’s wife cutting “her musky tresses” to grieve for and protest his death.

Allegedly the worst is behind us, 2024

Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose

Curated by Zoë Latzer

Curatorial Statement: “The exhibition features twelve contemporary artists who work to mend and amend the past in reckonings with memories, records, and archives, acting as both revisionists and storytellers. Drawing from their own family lineages and cultural backgrounds, in many cases lost or ruptured through forced relocation or removal, each artist explores what it means to be a living archive, carrying previous generations’ experience into the present. Through investigations in installation, painting, and video, they affirm the importance of art in keeping and questioning history—creating not mythic pasts but active practices for considering what stories need to be told, and, even rewritten. 

In Allegedly the worst is behind us, past knowledge and future imagination meld in the hands of living artists who show us how re-examinations of history can offer insight towards the radical changes needed for today. The exhibition prompts the questions: What does it mean to inhabit a fraught or silenced history? How do we critically analyze and reconstruct historical narratives while caring and tending to our communities? How can reflecting on the past create spaces of liberation for the future?”

Stanford University

Print on Purpose, Freedom and Justice for Iranian Women

A printmaking workshop with students in the Print on Purpose course, at Standford University’s d. School occurred on Nov 4, 2022. Karimi was invited to guide a printmaking workshop using trace monotype printmaking to create images of hair as a form of activism and as a visual approach to convey messages. The choice of subject matter, hair, was used as a deliberate and symbolic choice that carries social or cultural significance not only for Iranian women but also for many other cultures around the world. 

Inspiration and Research

Square Kufic is an Arabic script. The script was originally created with bricks and tiles in Iran, during the medieval period, functioning as pixels.
Arabic and Persian languages use similar alphabets but the languages don’t share the same origin. Below are examples of tile patterns and Square Kufic script, functioning as pixels, from the Topkapi scroll, in late medieval Iran.

Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at the mill building at MASS MoCA in June 2022 and MASS MoCA ground. Distorted Cubes and 8-point and 12-point Stars wall drawings.

In Williams College Museum of Art’s exhibition catalog, David S. Areford writes: “The cube-which was first featured in LeWitt’s structures in 1960s- becomes an incubator for new forms, as well as the site of instability and distortion.”