Collective Disquiet

featuring

Saba Farhoudnia

www.sabafarhoudnia.com

IG: @sabafarhoudnia 

Saba Farhoudnia was born in Tehran, Iran in 1987. Her work is about the human condition in today’s world, with a precarious present and insecure future. She has earned her Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting and her first Master of Art from The University of Science and Culture in Tehran, Iran. She received her second MFA in Painting from the LeRoy E.Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. Farhoudnia has been exhibiting her paintings across the Caribbean, Europe, Middle East, and the United States. Her work has been published in magazines such as Art Scope Magazine, Thalia Magazine, Studio Visit Magazine, and Words Without Borders. She is a 2020 fellow of the Artist In the Marketplace ( AIM) program at the Bronx Museum. She currently works and lives in New York City. 

Artist Statement: 

During the time that I was sheltered in my apartment because of the pandemic, I was celebrating the tenth year of being part of a Haitian community because my husband is Haitian. I started thinking about the role of women in my country Iran, the background of women's rights in the Middle East region. This brought me to begin analyzing women's rights in my countryside by side with slavery and finding similarities of this kind in other places in the world.

As a woman, I  have personally experienced gender discrimination in my country Iran and here in the United States, I continue facing racial discrimination. It is intensified because my husband is black. My husband and I live in a majority white neighborhood in New York City. One of our neighbors, with whom we share an open front yard, always puts his back to us when he sees us, just to avoid any possible conversation with us whatsoever.

I recently started to critically review the history of Haiti, the first black country in modern history to abolish slavery but now the media rather promote it as the poorest country in the American continent. I went a bit upper North with my research. About 400 years ago, the first group slaves were brought to the USA. The presence of them brought success to the United States because of their free labors. It is impossible to understand the economy of the United States today and the role of capitalism without understanding the role of slavery_especially in agriculture. The profits from cotton, for example, helped propel the United States into a position as one of the leading economies in the world. The slaves were forced to work and the labor of each slave was tracked daily, and those who did not meet their assigned picking goals were brutally beaten, sometimes until death. We all are in the most powerful country in the world today because of their free work but their recognition is no more than injustice, discrimination, and marginalization.

By the recent death of George Floyd and the unfoldment Black Lives Matter movement, I saw people of diverse skin color, ethnic background, creed, and migration status were in the front line protesting. It deepens my quest to evoke the intrinsic value of the human being in this series.