Golnar Adili

Visual Description: The sculptural paper-based work consists of an accordion-style folded paper with its edges face-up installed in an acrylic box. The Persian text is barely legible and read from right to left. Installed on a pedestal, viewers can walk around the work to attempt to read it from various angles.  

Wall Text: The work is a recreated letter between the artists' parents on the edge of 352 folds—to read the text, the reader must move around the work. “This process reflects my relationship to the letter; a desire to gain distance from the emotional content while simultaneously wanting to read the text to uncover the past,” explains Golnar Adili. After Iran’s revolution in 1979, Adili’s parents were eager to contribute to their new country and decided to leave the United States, where they had emigrated, to return to Iran. Unfortunately, her parents’ activism soon forced Adili’s father to leave. Until her college years, Golnar lived with her mother in Tehran while her father was living in the United States. Since her father’s passing, she has revisited his archive of family letters and photographs making them into puzzles, books, and other artworks. In them she has found her mother's complaints about her as a child, but also messages of multidirectional support and love but also anger and longing directed to her physically absent father. Memory, distance, and resolve mark this body of work.

About

Golnar Adili is a mixed media artist, educator, and designer with a focus on diasporic identity. She holds a Master’s degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and has attended residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation for the Arts in Bellagio, Italy, The Center for Book Arts, NY, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation for the Arts, Lower East Side Printshop, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace among others.

Some of the venues Adili has shown her work include, The Victoria And Albert Museum in London, Cue Art Foundation, NY, and International Print Center, NY. Some of the grants she has received include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the NYFA Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists Books, and the Jerome Hill Finalist Grant in addition to being a Jameel Prize finalist. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Parsons School of Design, Yale University, Harvard University, and University of Michigan, are a few collections where Adili’s Artist Books live.