Farideh Lashai | rabbit in wonderland

Canvas painting with sound and projected animation

Prelude to Rabbit in Wonderland | Video excerpt

Sound and projected animation on painting | 4 min
Edition of 7
Oil, acrylic and pencil on canvas
200 x 180 cm | 2010

In the Iranian literary history, symbolic figures appear and reappear to survive a tyrannical suppression of candour and free expression. References and guises fill this vocabulary throughout centuries. And the Iranian art and the Iranian psyche continues to flow in abstraction and in referential forms. The rabbits appear from depth of a mysterious abstract jungle, full of life and charged with untold narratives, expanding the painting as an elastic structure in time, material and space, then disappear, leaving behind a silent still painting, that is charged with the mythical, the imagined, and has colossal spaces for fantasies.
In this canvas, Farideh and the rabbit are playing and their game is like a preparation for a long journey, like Alice departing to Wonderland. The Rabbit is still unaware of all the predicaments awaiting him. It is preparation for a long passage replete of crashing moments that enfold you and crush you or make you anew, full of hope and disillusionment with ideologies. But this first initial moment of birth is entirely blissful, it is a moment of astonishment.

I Come from the Land of Ideology | Video excerpt

Sound and projected animation on painting | 4 min 30 sec
Edition of 7
Oil, acrylic and pencil on canvas
190 x 190 cm | overall size including projection 190 x 260 cm
2010

In continuation of Prelude the rabbits leave the canvas, and the White Rabbit stays alone. Not following his parents, this is the first act of disobedience, adulthood and path of modernity. New characters appear in thE canvas: the Raven and Toto extracted from Pasolini’s film “The Hawks and the Sparrows”. The talking raven says he hails from the Land of Ideology, born of Father Doubt and Mother Consciousness. In Pasolini’s movie, Toto and his son having grown tired of the raven’s incessant all-too-intellectual commentary unceremoniously kill and eat it. Here, the raven seduces the rabbit into looking into a hole, a dark area in the painting, and throws the rabbit into the rabbit-hole. The raven succeeds to take the rabbit out of the blissful jungle of fairy tales, out of the canvas to the wonderland of adults and ideologies.
Farideh imagined their dialogue to be as simple as Alice’s conversation with the Cheshire’s Cat:
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
The raven ecstatic from its victory flees the canvas, accompanying Toto as they gambol and dance to the music inspired by “the Hawks and the Sparrows”… The rabbit follows suit, unconscious of where he is being taken.

Gone Down the Rabbit Hole | Video excerpt

Sound and projected animation on painting | 4 min 30 sec
Edition of 3
Oil, acrylic and pencil on canvas
4 panels of 110 x 110 cm each (overall size 220 x 220 cm) | overall size including projection 220 x 320 cm
2010

The map in the shape of a cat is the artist’s Wonderland, a landscape where it is hard to find a way into. Tens and hundreds of rabbits struggle to enter and make it their own. But Wonderland is a land of trials and challenges.
The cat-shaped map opens its mouth, a rabbit-hole emerges and one rabbit, the one seduced by the raven falls therein and emerges into the Wonderland of Iran. It leaps across the country and paves the way for others. The map of Iran implodes with Farideh’s rabbits with their ears pricked up and eyes wide open to danger.

Dear, Dear! How Queer Everything is Today | Video excerpt

Sound and projected animation on painting | 6 min
Edition of 7
Oil, acrylic and pencil on canvas
200 x 90 cm | overall size including projection 200 x 180 cm
2010

The rabbit of the story gambols over the canvases to meet the great figure of Iranian history, Mossadegh. In a moment embedded in Iranian collective memory, an image of Mossadegh walking in his land in Ahmadabad under house arrest, the rabbit runs in panic round him. As if his panic was everyone’s, that of the universe, of “the time of the ruins of ideals”. The Rabbit engages in an absurd monologue inspired by Alice’s conversation with different figures in Wonderland.
“Which road do I take?”
Did I get it right “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there”

Keep your Interior Empty of Food/That you Mayest Behold Therein the Light of Interior | Video excerpt

Sound and projected animation on painting | 4 min 30 sec
Edition of 7
Oil, acrylic and pencil on canvas
180 x 200 cm | 2010

“That black stick, you have always felt it over your head like a fluttering flag,” Farideh writes in her novel, expressing the omnipresent fear instilled by decades of ideology and doctrine. Timeless shadows of black ravens lurk in the background. They emerge full-bodied, pungent and frightening and sit at a feast of food and luxuries. The talking raven has grown into a crow, joined by his companions, sharing the feast in the supposed Promised Land. They hold the stick of oppression in front of the curious rabbit eager to participate. Uninvited, he is hurt with each encounter and leaves the canvas, exhausted, daunted and forced to disillusionment.