Farvash

What is- the- matter Oracle?

Born in Iran, Farvash is a research-based artist whose practice is deeply rooted within Persian mythologies, histories, and ontologies.

Her practice focuses on transformative processes that span from metamorphic realities to navigating contemporary immigration guilt. 

With a background in chemistry, she redefines scientific methods within the realm of material science and art. Creation of materials by studying characteristics, qualities, properties and behaviours from the smallest material component, nanotechnology and extends all levels to performance, lectures, and installations.

While she is concerned with the coming realities, she also has an enviable past; such as negotiating with the sports ministry of Iran for female stadium access, forcing Director of Pernod Ricard to lay down on the floor and do hypnosis as well as designed security features for banknotes worldwide.

If you care to know more about the past, please visit website for CV.

Whoever holds the power to matter (present time: matter that gives revenue), in return, has power over the world.

As a maker, my performance practice is an intuitive channelling. The performance functions as a spiritual tool. The connection between the subject, time, tension and audience, gives the body access to embedded and unconscious knowledge. Not everything is logical, rational, and describable. As for the matter/material, since our bodies are firstly materials, I believe they are embedded with information, maybe about the nonlinear past or a potential nonlinear future. And maybe even: there is no separation of a past or future, they are both the same. 

So if "Matter/Material" is a vehicle to access other realities, so what is "matter"?

I´m interested in materials, since I see them as a vessel of past and future knowledge. In our present time, materials are politics, it is an embodiment of the financial structure and it holds the intention of society as well as the direction of a society. Material science is a discipline developing new materials, traditionally driven by two defined forces, "market pull", and "technology push" where “technology push” is mostly governed by military industries, health industries and national strategies. While "market pull" is a market requested development, for example, the speedy development of VR for sex industries. Material science today functions as applied science to provide us a market-oriented technological human development. 

Who decides the direction of our future and our society? Who makes the decision? Who has the power to change it? And what is my role as an artist?

Questions such as these contextualize the material aspect of my practice and serve to explain why I create my own materials. My practice is a process, which dismantles the forces, which are continually shaping my identity and my interests. This connects to my central interest in the origin and future of the imagination, and its relationship to capitalism and power-based social structures.

In the 1984 book Reasons and Persons, philosopher Derek Parfit asks the reader to consider the following scenario: 

“You step into a teleportation machine that scans your complete atomic structure, annihilates you, and then relays that atomic information to Mars at the speed of light. There, a similar machine recreates your exact atomic structure and composition using locally available resources. Have you just travelled, Parfit asks, or have you committed suicide?”

The arrangement of molecular components gives a whole new set of conditions. If a material can never be destroyed nor created but always transform into a new matter would it still contain the memory of its past? 

In one parallel reality, I died, I got burned, and my ashes were compressed into a carbon stone. Does that stone have my consciousness embedded? Left for xx years, one day, in a new world a creature type: "dog" eats the stone, poops it out. As I am now an inanimate material, traveling inside the dog and then I am pooped out on this material called concrete - what information is left within the body of this poo-like material?