Freeing up the Windup Dolls

Navab explores how the same tool which winds the doll will become the key that frees her. Like her invented heroine, Super East-West Woman, whose chador turns into a cape of agency—transformation, metamorphosis and reinvention are significant strategies for survival explored in Navab’s art. This series is inspired by one of Iran’s first feminist voices, Forough Farrokhzad (1934-67) and her poem “The Wind-up Doll” (1959): “More than this, ah yes, one can remain silent more than this…Exactly like a wind-up doll, one can see one’s own world with two glass eyes. One can sleep for years in a felt-lined box, on lace and tinsel. And in response to every obscene squeeze of a hand, one can exclaim without reason: ‘Oh, I’m so happy!”

Drawing from the Wind-Up Doll series by Aphrodite Navab. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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Presenter Bio

Aphrodite Désirée Navab

Born in Iran and based in New York, the artist Aphrodite Désirée Navab mines her Iranian, Greek and American heritage, calling forth its competing histories, myths, and politics and tracing its impact on her personal identity. Navab’s art has been featured in over one hundred and fifty exhibitions and is included in a number of permanent collections including: The Addison Gallery of American Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Lowe Art Museum, the Harn Museum of Fine Arts, Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, Naples, Italy, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Arkansas State University. At present, Navab had a solo museum show, Landmines of Memory, at the Addison Gallery of American Art (Jan-April 2021). She had a solo exhibition, The Homeling, at Johannes Vogt gallery in New York (Jan.-Feb. 2018). Her work was exhibited at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the traveling group museum show: Men of Steel, Women of Wonder, (Feb 9-April 22, 2019). In 2009, her art was featured in the museum exhibition and catalogue, Through the Lens: Photography from the Permanent Collection, at the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami. The exhibition featured only 100 significant photographs from more than 1,000 photographic holdings from: Julia Margaret Cameron and Walker Evans to Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson.

Resources

• Aphrodite Désirée Navab’s Website
• Instagram at @aphroditedesiree

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Artivism: The Power of Art for Social Transformation
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