Growing up in the ’90s in Yazd, Iran, Roksana Pirouzmand was surrounded by familial creativity. Her mother sewed all the family’s clothes, and her grandmother, remembering songs from her youth, played them on the daf, a Persian drum often used in weddings. Pirouzmand adopted a similar proclivity for making things with her hands, though she entered high school intending to study science, before cajoling her parents into letting her attend art school instead.
After high school, Pirouzmand and several former classmates started an art collective; around 2008, they staged a series of public interventions scattered around the campus of the Yazd Art and Architecture University. For her piece, Pirouzmand stood in a pond, goggles covering her face, and attempted to paint a portrait underwater. It ended with the artist asking one of her teachers, who was in the audience, what he thought of this subaquatic art. He did not respond.
“After the first night, [the university] was like, ‘sorry, you can’t come back here,’” Pirouzmand recalls, sitting in her airy garage studio in Sherman Oaks, California, where she relocated in 2012 via a refugee program for religious minorities. She’s never had another experience quite as risky and thrilling as that subaquatic public intervention. “Those performances, even though I was not sure what I was doing … that was so exciting,” she says. This excitement has been a constant through line animating Pirouzmand’s practice. Ranging from painted ceramics to sculpture in various metals, her works unfurl stories at once personal and intergenerational, by turns playful and sobering.
Roksana Pirouzmand: Until All Is Dissolved, 2023.
Photo Josh White. Courtesy the artist.
Pirouzmand, who is Zoroastrian, initially lived with her aunt in Valencia, California, after emigrating from Iran. There, she found herself drawn to the interdisciplinary ethos of nearby CalArts, and wound up pursuing her BFA there, honing her interest in performance but also exploring textiles and sculpture. In Feel the Velvet (2015), a work Pirouzmand made while still a student, she had participants enter a gallery space one by one, then put on an unwieldy gown encrusted with velvet stones. Every time someone wore the 50-pound dress, Pirouzmand sewed one more stone on it. “I was thinking about the labor of being an artist,” she says. “By putting the weight on the audience … I was distributing this labor, in a way.”
Around 2020, Pirouzmand began painting on clay slabs, because the Covid pandemic precluded having an audience. The paintings initially mapped out future performances, in physical and psychological realms. Soon, a series emerged entitled “I was praying at home while you were dying on the streets” (2022), which envisions figures lying on the ground as though meditating, their long hair being drawn toward a void. These works also nod toward civil unrest in Iran, as does her 2022 performance, Tapping, Rocking, Remembering, wherein Pirouzmand tugged on strands of hair that were attached—through a wall—to terra-cotta casts of her grandmother’s fingers: the tugs caused the fingers to tap cacophonously.
Around that time, sculpture started to find its way into Pirouzmand’s work, but the body remains decidedly present. One of her pieces in the latest edition of Made in L.A., Until All Is Dissolved (2023), is a ceramic cast of five headless figures stacked over one another in an attitude of submission. Water flowing down the piece drenched and deteriorated the figures throughout the show’s run, their bodies cracking as their prayers seemed to give way to begging.
