Foroozan Shirghani: Alienation

This collection is about alienation – expressing constantly changing, fragmented lives.  The figurations in this collection are an allegory to social pressures and psychological traumas, caused either by the endless drudgery of work or by the socio-political ruling systems. Alienation is usually an inevitable consequence of these bureaucracies and leads to distortion and deformation of human personality and life.

I address this situation by compressing and homogenizing my subjects and by placing them in an apocalyptic world where place, time, and even the very appearance of humanity undergo drastic changes. People gradually become alienated from others as well as from themselves and this leads to even more isolation and loneliness. I explore the irreversible psychological damage of force caused by twisting my subjects with fear, isolation, anger, despair, and eventually obedience. Consequently, in some of my works the figures take refuge in buildings that have no comfort and vast emptiness,  only a decaying surveillance site. Here time has lost its credibility and value and the only source of hope is scant rays of light among the shadows.

The initial idea of this collection was formed shortly after I immigrated to the States in 2015. I felt a sort of amputation from my homeland and a kinship with the crushed plastic water bottles that I used to line up on my desk every day. The bottles were pressed and deformed easily just like a person under pressure and that was the beginning of an ongoing experiment with various mediums to discover the potential of this symbolic form of the critical and fragile human condition.