Roksana Pirouzmand’s uncanny valley

At ‘Smoke’, Frieze London’s curated section devoted to ceramics, one major highlight was Roksana Pirouzmand’s suite of paintings in Murmurs Gallery’s booth. On thin slabs of hardened clay were tiny figures with cavernous black holes for faces and piles of hands and feet poking out from an alien hillside. The mysterious landscapes had fluid contours that might have been piles of blankets or strands of hair.

“Juxtaposing things that you usually don’t see together can give life to a third image,” Pirouzmand told Plaster during a studio visit this summer, adding that hair is also a recurring motif in her work, “like a chord or a connection between one body to the other.”

On the other side of the world, in the perennially sunny Los Angeles suburbs of the San Fernando Valley, scenes similar to Pirouzmand’s surrealist paintings unfold around her airy garage-turned-studio. Ceramic hands and feet poke out of the soil of her garden where an Afghan mulberry tree bears fruit. Disembodied terracotta limbs stick out of boxes with labels like ‘sewn rocks’, ‘wearable ceramics’ and ‘things that can happen in a room’. These capture the uncanniness of her multidisciplinary practice, where, as a performance artist primarily, she brings ceramics to life in remarkably visceral ways—sometimes with kinetic elements like motors or her physical body, or through haunting combinations of imagery that rattle the brain.

The Iranian artist moved to Southern California in 2012. Her breakout moment was at the Hammer Museum’s 2023 ‘Made in L.A.’ biennial, where she debuted Until All Is Dissolved (2023), a stack of hollow ceramic bodies bent in prayer with arms outstretched. A gentle trickle of water provided very subtle but effective kinetic and sonic elements, continuously washing over their arms while slowly accumulating rust. There was a familial tenderness to the way their hands lay on top of one another, but what surprised Pirouzmand was how frequently viewers interpreted the work as an expression of generational, female, or immigrant trauma. “My life was normal,” the artist assures, dispelling assumptions that there’s anything inherently traumatising about growing up in Iran.

The artist grew up in the small town of Yazd and focussed on painting at her specialised art high school. Her early encounters with performance art were thanks to a young teacher who supplemented the curriculum with contemporary art magazines from Tehran. Pirouzmand vividly remembers him introducing the class to Rhythm 0, the 1974 performance in which Marina Abramović presented the audience with 72 items – including a scalpel, a gun and a pair of scissors – and invited them to engage. “It exposed me to the idea of bodily precarity,” Pirouzmand recalled, while performance art itself appealed to her sense of teenage rebellion. “It was this feeling that I could break the rules, and the audience would have no idea what they were about to see.” She and her classmates formed a small art collective to organise happenings, and in one of her earliest performances, she left a trail of poetry that led her peers to the basement of her parents’ home. Inspired in part by poet Gibran Khalil Gibran’s ruminations on death, Pirouzmand had painted black figures all over the walls—without asking her parents’ permission, of course.

Pirouzmand moved to Valencia, California to live with her aunt, and with no specific plans, managed to enroll at CalArts for her undergrad, followed by UCLA for her MFA. The move was lonely at first, Pirouzmand said, “but I was so excited about being in a school with access to all these facilities.” Inspired by multimedia sculptors like Mona Hatoum and Louise Bourgeois, she began expanding her practice to tactile crafts like crochet and ceramics. “Making things with my hands is so crucial to my practice,” she added. “I have to play around with the material to find out its potential, and conceptually where I can go with it.”

The last year has been a busy one for the artist, with solo shows at Francois Ghebaly in New York and  Spurs Gallery in Beijing. In September, she inaugurated her solo show at Mexico City’s Vernacular Institute with A Flame, A Rock, Between Two Mountains, a performance in which thousands of motorised black threads yanked her dress from left to right as she stood holding a melting candle in the shape of a hand. In the adjacent room, another set of motorized black strings dragged stones and ceramic legs in a circular motion across the floor. The Spurs show included in tandem (2024), a performance in which Pirouzmand stood facing an image of her mother painted onto a weighty ceramic slab, and held it upright with the thousands of black threads sewn into her dress. Its emotional and physical tension shared elements of Rest Energy, Abramović and Ulay’s 1980 performance, where they held a taught bow and arrow between them, “although I didn’t realise that until after,” she said. For many performance artists, translating the live energy of their work for the gallery space is often a challenge, but even afterward, as the dress sat empty on the floor, it resonated with an intriguing aura – the uncanny feeling that something strange had happened there.