Self Service
Neda Razavipour
- Period
- 2009
- Location
- Azad Art Gallery, Tehran
Project Overview
Self-Service was a participatory installation about everyday violence. Neda Razavipour spread across the gallery floor a set of second-hand, handwoven Iranian carpets selected from different parts of Iran, and invited visitors to choose a part of a carpet they liked, cut it out, and take it with them. But before leaving, participants were asked to place the pieces they had chosen into an envelope printed with a quotation, each labeled with a quotation from Plato's Republic.
Context & Site
The work took shape in the months after the marches and the first street clashes following the 2009 election; days when violence had become the everyday language of the city. Rather than making an image of that violence, Razavipour intended to make a situation in which each person had to reflect on, or talk about, their own relationship to the violence unfolding in daily life, in the time between the invitation and a single cut.
The work's initial idea had arisen for performance in urban public space. The artist had intended to stage the installation in Salmas Square, directly across from the gallery, and to invite ordinary passersby to encounter the work. The conditions of late 2009 made this impossible, and it was this unavoidable choice that shaped the composition of those present: mostly people from the art world, and alongside them a number of neighbors and passersby who had heard of the work. Even so, the enclosed space of the gallery made possible the artist's direct encounter with each visitor, and over the course of the day the crowd, and the tension that rose with it, accumulated in that same enclosed and relatively safe space.
Participation & Process
For the performance, the artist bought several madder-red handwoven carpets, all second-hand; their being second-hand mattered to her, because these carpets had come from people's homes. The carpets were spread across the gallery floor and lit from below, so that in the early hours the space resembled a carpet-filled shabestan (a mosque's covered prayer hall). Beside the carpets she placed scissors and box cutters, and paper envelopes printed on one side in Persian and the other in English. On the envelopes was a passage from Plato's text about Leontius, who returns from the battlefield, comes upon a heap of corpses, tries not to look but is overcome by the desire to see, and finally cries out to his own eyes to take their fill of that sight. In Razavipour's words, this text, without being explicit, alluded to violence and to the human being's simultaneous pull toward seeing and toward taking part. The work's poster, too, showed only a pair of scissors with a drop of blood, and unlike ordinary announcements carried no explanation.
The artist had designed participation not through a call but through hosting. Razavipour herself went to each visitor and explained the work calmly, in a tone that was neither commanding nor joking, laying out three rules for the visitors: one could not take a whole carpet away; only a piece of it was to be cut. The cut piece had to be placed in the prepared envelope. And the envelope could not be taken away empty; to take the envelope, the act of cutting had to be performed.
The audience had varied reactions. Some cut, some chatted, some sat in a corner and only watched, and some argued and quarreled. The first to cut was not the artist; it was an older woman who had come to the gallery for another matter and who said she had wondered since childhood why a carpet should be underfoot and not on the wall, and then began to cut out a large piece, which was hard work. A woman in a flowered headscarf spent a long, patient while cutting out the carpet's flower. Someone who was an architect cut the carpet's border and spoke about the importance of the border. Some, instead of cutting the existing pattern, drew a new pattern of their own into the carpet. In one place, three young women sat together and cut at the same time, in a composition that, in her words, resembled the way carpet-weavers sit. Cutting the carpets was not at all easy, and each piece took time and effort.
The performance had been planned for a single day, over four hours, but hours and then another day were added to it, because visitors passed word to one another and the crowd kept coming to the gallery. Then the pieces made their way into people's homes and, in the artist's account, went on talking there: a piece taken home on a Friday night and shown to a guest became an occasion to retell what had happened in the gallery space and to debate the reasons for what had occurred. Some later wanted to return their piece, and some wrote that they regretted it.
"Self-Service" was later performed outside Iran as well, in a group exhibition in Gothenburg, Sweden (2011) and in the courtyard of the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2012), where it was presented under the title "Self-Service / Souvenirs"; a word that at once carried keepsake, gift, and memory. Although the work had been designed specifically for the atmosphere of 2009, in later years and outside Iran, through the recognized value of the Iranian carpet, audiences still engaged with the work, and some reacted just as sharply.
Motivations & Questions
Neda's motivation for this work came from the atmosphere of those days. In casual conversations among artists, the talk was mostly of the violence of "them"; but she had seen in the street that violence came from the people too, and had come to think that anyone, placed in that position, could be violent.
What was shocking for me was that I saw that any person, given the chance, can be a violent person and can even reach physical violence, whether verbal or whatever, and I thought I simply couldn't work on this.
Out of this thought, she arrived at everyday violence; the small, minute violence that goes unspoken but is a sign of a larger violence. Arriving at the carpet also had several roots for her. Years earlier, a carpet left behind by her mother had had to be cut with scissors, and the image of something so intimate and valuable being cut had become bound up for her with wound and violence.
Her question in this work was directed at this very desire: the human desire to see and to take part, even in something that is violence; the same allusion the Plato text on the envelopes carried. The wider context was the political atmosphere and censorship of those same years. In the course of the performance, the question also arose whether such a work was itself an encouragement of violence. Even so, in her own words, her work was not undertaken with the aim of making a political work; she wanted rather to open a social-political event into the everyday lives of audiences who did not necessarily have political concerns. For this reason her initial intent was to perform the work in urban space, in participation with passersby in the street, which did not prove possible.
Conditions & Negotiations
Part of the reactions to the work called it "an encouragement of violence," and some afterward no longer spoke to Neda. She responded that the work was not judgmental and that she compelled no one to do anything; she only placed people in a situation so that they might decide for themselves.
But the main constraint was performing the work in public space in that year. In such a situation, gathering several people with scissors and box cutters in public space and obtaining a permit was practically impossible. For this reason, the artist turned to the interior of the gallery space.
After the performance, the cut pieces went into people's homes, and this caused the affair to spread by word of mouth through the city. After hearing about the work, Lili Golestan held a conversation with the artist with the aim of publishing an article. This conversation later led to a book titled Tigh va Tar va Pud (Blade, Warp and Weft), in collaboration with Nazar Publishing; but its publication was banned by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance on account of the references the text made to the events of that year. After a session at the Ministry and about six years later, the book was published without change by Sales Publications.
Documentation
Collaborators & Support
The poster and graphic design of the work were by Farhad Fozouni. Documentation of the performance was handled by Erfan Arfa, who photographed in the moment; several assistants were also present during the performance. Azad Art Gallery supported the work by providing the space and spreading the word about it; the work had no production budget and proceeded at the artist's own personal expense.
Further Resources
Nasrin Tabatabai, “Self-Service, Performance in Iran,” Safheh magazine, no. 8, 2011 (in Persian).
Ali Ettehad, “Self-Service”, Honar-e Farda (Art Tomorrow), no. 1, Tehran, 2009 (in Persian).
Rozita Sharafjahan’s account of Self-Service (in Persian).
Tigh va Tar va Pud (Blade, Warp and Weft), a conversation between Lili Golestan and Neda Razavipour, Sales Publications, Tehran (in Persian).
Sahar Azad, “Cutting the Carpet: The Twofold Boundary of Pleasure and Revulsion” (in Persian).
A short film of the launch ceremony for Tigh va Tar va Pud (in Persian).
A conversation with Neda Razavipour about her activities in public space, Dar Jaryan (in Persian).
Shargh newspaper’s conversation with Neda Razavipour (in Persian).
Tamasha: Works of Neda Razavipour (in Persian).
“Neda Razavipour: Reflections on Art, Memory, and Public Space”, BBC Persian, Tamasha (interview, English subtitles).
Ali Ettehad, “A review on Neda Razavipour’s installation-performance at Azad Gallery, Dec. 4–5, 2009”, Art Tomorrow, Vol. I, Spring 2010.
Morad Montazami in conversation with Neda Razavipour (in French with English subtitles).
Fereshte S. Moosavi Jafari, Studying Curatorial-Abilities: Environmenting, Improvising, Inhabiting States of Affairs (PhD thesis).
About the Artist
Neda Razavipour (b. 1968, Tehran) is an interdisciplinary and intermedia artist. She is a graduate in visual arts from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and in space/set design from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (Paris). The artist first presented her work at the Conceptual Art exhibition (2001) at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, and has since worked in various media including installation, drawing, photography, video, and performance. Her works have been presented to date in eight solo exhibitions and dozens of international group shows.
This entry was written on the basis of the project documentation and a conversation with the artist, and was edited in collaboration with the artist.