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rex delafkaran



Sculpture

HOT _____

Vessels
 Tender Bits

DILS

Snake Tongues

    For One Thing at a Time

    Nevermind Azizam

    SLABS


Performance

Everything I Hold is Wet

Demonstrations for Use (for Hafez)

BENDS

Carpet Crop

    A snake in the day and a fish by night
    The way you say I Miss You


ABOUT REX

cv here



contact me
delafkaran@gmail.com


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

The foundation of my practice is rooted in methods and acts of translation, between intersecting and conflicting systems. Working within ceramics, interdisciplinary sculpture, performance art and dance I expand on concepts of hybrid identity and langua ges, functions and failure, and acts of translation.

Using the languages of performance art, dance and objects my work translates ideas physically. These translations result in live performance, multimedia documentation, ceramic and sculpture, and through my practice I explore the aesthetics of written language, functional objects and queer failure congruently to better pose a question. By visualizing and embodying language, I can further investigate the humor, formal relationships, and discomfort found when ideas are expressed with or through a body or simplified shape.

I’m interested in the body as an object and objects as bodies, and through the use of my own alongside legible materials, I access personal, cultural minutiae, resulting in hybrid forms. A question rises from the tensions between objects like cinder blocks and crafted ceramic vessels, or a ceramic dildo alongside an imaginary flag, and the question is the aim. My practice settles into divergence long enough to make evident the intertwined constructs of identity, utility and legibility. In what ways do we translate our personal and historical archives into our bodies, and in what ways do haptic translations deepen and hybridize existing knowledge?

Reconciling and constructing my Iranian American queer identity is generative, and affects my understanding of legibility, aesthetics, humor, desire and language. I am interested in what languages and materials we have at our disposal. Where does the visceral and emotional mythologize utility and identity? While reconsidering the literal and cultural functions of objects and bodies, I am specifically reconsidering the contexts of dance, ceramics, and the materials of performance documentation.