CV
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bio
Rex Delafkaran is an Iranian-American interdisciplinary artist and dancer from California, currently based in Washington, D.C. Delafkaran holds a degree in Ceramics and Performance Art from the San Francisco Art Institute. Using movement and objects she explores ideas of failure and tensions between bodies, intimacy and language. She has exhibited work and staged performances at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC), IA&A at Hillyer (Washington, DC), Transformer Gallery (Washington, DC), Panoply Performance Lab (Brooklyn, NY), Southern Exposure Gallery (San Francisco, CA), and the Textile Museum at The George Washington University (Washington, DC) among other venues. Delafkaran was the Exhibition Director of Hamiltonian Artists in Washington, DC till December 2020. Often working collaboratively, Delafkaran curates independently, teaches movement and ceramics practices, and continues to perform and exhibit nationally and internationally.
bio
Rex Delafkaran is an Iranian-American interdisciplinary artist and dancer from California, currently based in Washington, D.C. Delafkaran holds a degree in Ceramics and Performance Art from the San Francisco Art Institute. Using movement and objects she explores ideas of failure and tensions between bodies, intimacy and language. She has exhibited work and staged performances at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC), IA&A at Hillyer (Washington, DC), Transformer Gallery (Washington, DC), Panoply Performance Lab (Brooklyn, NY), Southern Exposure Gallery (San Francisco, CA), and the Textile Museum at The George Washington University (Washington, DC) among other venues. Delafkaran was the Exhibition Director of Hamiltonian Artists in Washington, DC till December 2020. Often working collaboratively, Delafkaran curates independently, teaches movement and ceramics practices, and continues to perform and exhibit nationally and internationally.
artist statement
Tied up in my work is a dedication to concepts of futility and the abject, and the occasional awkwardness of sincerity and tenderness. I am interested in what materials we have at our disposal to make meaning, and where we mythologize utility and identity.
My practice is grounded in language, relationships between bodies and functional objects, and what our labor means in late-stage capitalism. I question cultural systems through my queer, Iranian, American, and feminist lineage and history. While working across disciplines I play with and combine materials with calculation in order to exercise the hybrid objects’ gestalt meanings.
What happens when we make hard edges where there are none? Or when we refuse singularity in form, identity, and objecthood? Does reinventing new frameworks for a practice reassert the harmful social, political, and economic structures in which we already live? These are questions alive in the making of my work.
Within additional frameworks of sensitivity, anti-productivity and humor, I am translating ideas predominantly through interdisciplinary sculpture, ceramics, and live performance. When deployed in space the objects perform aliveness, in between active and static.
I think about the body as a tool and through the use of my own, both as a performer and a maker, I am wading through personal, cultural minutiae to make sense of where and how we position ourselves. The resulting artworks tie materials to history or location, production to labor and capital, and performance to the exercise of embodiment.
My practice is grounded in language, relationships between bodies and functional objects, and what our labor means in late-stage capitalism. I question cultural systems through my queer, Iranian, American, and feminist lineage and history. While working across disciplines I play with and combine materials with calculation in order to exercise the hybrid objects’ gestalt meanings.
What happens when we make hard edges where there are none? Or when we refuse singularity in form, identity, and objecthood? Does reinventing new frameworks for a practice reassert the harmful social, political, and economic structures in which we already live? These are questions alive in the making of my work.
Within additional frameworks of sensitivity, anti-productivity and humor, I am translating ideas predominantly through interdisciplinary sculpture, ceramics, and live performance. When deployed in space the objects perform aliveness, in between active and static.
I think about the body as a tool and through the use of my own, both as a performer and a maker, I am wading through personal, cultural minutiae to make sense of where and how we position ourselves. The resulting artworks tie materials to history or location, production to labor and capital, and performance to the exercise of embodiment.
