BITA FAYYAZI

Bita Fayyazi (born 1962, Tehran) lives and works in Tehran. Fayyazi is an artist who works within a performative and markedly social practice. Beginning in the mid-1990s, her artistic interventions challenged the official definitions of art circulating in Tehran at that time. Fayyazi struggled to show her work amidst an atmosphere of stuffy traditionalism, academicism, and the influx of 1990s conceptual art from abroad. She successfully entered 2000 pieces of ceramic cockroaches into Tehran's 6th Biennial of Contemporary Ceramic Art, and cast and fired terracotta dogs (Road Kill, 1998), modelled on dead dogs found on the highways in Tehran, and then placed her works on the streets around the city. Each of Fayyazi's work has its roots in a form of participative social sculpture of gathering whatever materials are readily available. She also brings together artists and non-artistically inclined collaborators who can wrap and entwine, paint and cast. She reconstitutes the energies of a multitude of people toward an uncertain result. The final object becomes less important than the process.