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bio
Rex Delafkaran is an Iranian-American interdisciplinary artist and dancer from California, based in Chicago. Her artworks use bodies and objects to play with the failure, poetry and labor among readymade and handmade materials, while exploring the constructions of identity and language as we find ourselves squeezed through violence of late stage capitalism.
Delafkaran has exhibited and performed at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, DC; Panoply Performance Lab, NY; Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Platform Projects, Greece; Textile Museum, Washington, DC; Satellite Art Fair, FL; and EXPO Chicago, IL, among others. She is a recipient of a Warhol Foundation ‘Wherewithal Research Grant’ and recently awarded the Eldon Danhausen Sculpture Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Delafkaran holds a degree in Ceramics and Performance from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
bio
Rex Delafkaran is an Iranian-American interdisciplinary artist and dancer from California, based in Chicago. Her artworks use bodies and objects to play with the failure, poetry and labor among readymade and handmade materials, while exploring the constructions of identity and language as we find ourselves squeezed through violence of late stage capitalism.
Delafkaran has exhibited and performed at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, DC; Panoply Performance Lab, NY; Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Platform Projects, Greece; Textile Museum, Washington, DC; Satellite Art Fair, FL; and EXPO Chicago, IL, among others. She is a recipient of a Warhol Foundation ‘Wherewithal Research Grant’ and recently awarded the Eldon Danhausen Sculpture Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Delafkaran holds a degree in Ceramics and Performance from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Delafkaran has exhibited and performed at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, DC; Panoply Performance Lab, NY; Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Platform Projects, Greece; Textile Museum, Washington, DC; Satellite Art Fair, FL; and EXPO Chicago, IL, among others. She is a recipient of a Warhol Foundation ‘Wherewithal Research Grant’ and recently awarded the Eldon Danhausen Sculpture Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Delafkaran holds a degree in Ceramics and Performance from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
artist statement
Through objects and performance I try to understand what labor and language feels like; what does it look like? Using bodies and movement as my center, I investigate the humor and discomfort found when ideas are expressed with or through a specific body, shape, or material. I wade through personal and cultural minutiae to make sense of how we position ourselves in relation to one another. I use everyday or found objects with a history, symbolically charged materials like beeswax and salt, and craft materials like clay, wood and fibers. The resulting artworks tie materials to history or location, production to labor and capital, and performance to the exercise of embodiment.
I am fixated on failing systems and the awkwardness of tenderness. My work explores the physical distance between where I come from and where I am. I ask where we mythologize utility and identity. What I do is in reaction to the disillusionment, pleasure, curiosity, and anxiety of living in often violent systems of categorization. The categorization of people through labor and commodification is overwhelming, and transforms personal and collective identities. Language has the ability to be both concrete and gelatinous, and my practice plays with the abstraction of in-betweenness.
I question and exercise existing cultural systems through my queer, Iranian, American, and feminist aesthetic lineages in hopes to connect and understand.
I am fixated on failing systems and the awkwardness of tenderness. My work explores the physical distance between where I come from and where I am. I ask where we mythologize utility and identity. What I do is in reaction to the disillusionment, pleasure, curiosity, and anxiety of living in often violent systems of categorization. The categorization of people through labor and commodification is overwhelming, and transforms personal and collective identities. Language has the ability to be both concrete and gelatinous, and my practice plays with the abstraction of in-betweenness.
I question and exercise existing cultural systems through my queer, Iranian, American, and feminist aesthetic lineages in hopes to connect and understand.
