minoo emami
Wounded Beauty
We are pleased to introduce you to Minoo Emami, an Iranian self-taught artist. She lived through two major periods in Iran’s violent history – the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. At the age of 18, she married a wounded soldier – it was then that the prosthesis became the symbol of the permanent, lasting effects of war and was the motivation to choose war as the focus of her artistic process.
Emami is a painter, a sculptor, a photographer, a performance artist – each and every object she creates is part of her mission to bring a better understanding of the destruction of a person’s body and soul from the cruelty of war…she concentrates on the consequences of war through the eyes of a woman.
She has created sculptures of arms and legs in blown glass and pierced steel, each with an original prosthesis. The glass arms and legs are beautiful in colored glass in reds, oranges, blues and greens and rich in her painted designs on the glass – the protheses, however, are a fleshy color in direct contrast to their vibrant counterparts. Emami worked with a master glass blower in Iran as well as a metalsmith, teaching herself to be able to work in both mediums.
Emami’s newest drawings show women wearing the traditional hijab conveying their modesty. The women are shrouded in a white lace, pure and virginal – they are nude behind the lace and vary in skin tone and cultural reference. 74 describes the series of photographs which reveal the 74 lashes a woman can receive for not wearing her hijab in public, these images are exceptional and uncomfortable. Emami has dipped a whip in black acrylic paint and lashed large pieces of acrylic 74 times creating a violent ripping pattern – behind each section is a woman whose skin is seen beneath the evidence of violence. In this series of images, poems and dancing female figures highlight the Iranian women’s resistance.
The visual experiences and pieces, while revealing the horrors of war are simultaneously beautiful; that despair/hope, love/hate, death/survival, are always present. She embodies strength, beauty and ability to survive and to remember, to hopefully change the future. Emami’s art dignifies the bodies of those who have to experience war.
A primary function of art is the engagement and elevation of the human spirit. The purpose of war is to injure or destroy the body and spirit. My art lies at the intersection of these conflicting dualities and embodies the tensions. Just as art seeks to transcend that which would hold it down, war works to hold down that which would transcend it.
As a female artist who lived through the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, my work reflects the impact of the violence, chiefly that war, through memories, tangible artifacts, and altered experiences. By means of a variety of artistic projects, I seek to highlight the detrimental consequences of war and violence upon ordinary people.
My art creates enslavement between the contradictions of war’s aftermath; a mixture of wounding and healing, hope and despair, isolation and intimacy. Through the portrayal and utilization of used prostheses, I hope to transform the harsh realities of war into objects of beauty. My art, then, is both profane and sacred. – Minno Emami
Currently, Emami lives and works in the United States and Iran. She has exhibited in Dubai, Switzerland, United States, Germany, Iran, and Kurdistan (Iraq) and has been published in Iran, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Germany. Emami received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Art at Tufts University in 2019.