Laleh Kazemi Veisari
Compass
Private view Thursday 22.08, 5–7 PM
23.08 – 21.09.2024
Belenius
There are works of art that impose a sense of existential challenge. They disturb and ask, pointing to realms of ethics and the unknown. What will I hear, loose, know – if I expose myself to their way of speaking? The encounter with artist Laleh Kazemi Veisari’s works leaves me with an experience of heightened intensity and space. Light is felt as negation and a prompting to enter into new spheres of insight. An ethical urgency surfaces and a sometimes tormented but agile kind of playfulness. Kazemi Veisari’s practice embraces complexity, but simultaneously seems to act as a lowering anchor. Her art draws up a search changing with time, a continuously shifting compass needle penetrating the lens of memory. Distant stories merge in the background, touching biographical threads spread over many countries and with a deeply personal setup of symbols. And so, it is perhaps consistent, that these artworks speak to me from a position on the ground. Not surprisingly, Kazemi Veisari’s working process often takes place on the floor, beginning in the tangible.
Marie Tonkin, Stockholm, 2024, (excerpt from the exhibition text)
Laleh Kazemi Veisari was born 1983 in Stockholm, Sweden, where she lives and works.
Kazemi Veisari's interdisciplinary practice embraces drawing, painting, sculpture and writing. Her work with archives, memory and language leaves traces in spatial, visual and literary expressions. In her practice she documents and uses found material and stories to study these fragments both intuitively and methodically through different media: the montage of image, objects and text hold new connections in space.
Among Kazemi Veisari’s solo exhibitions are Bror Hjorths Hus, Uppsala, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, Oktogonen, Göteborgs Konsthall and GIBCA Extended – Galleri Konstepidemin, Gothenburg. She is the recipient of the 2018 Bror Hjorth Drawing Grant (Bror Hjorthföreningens stipendium för unga tecknare), the 2019 Bernadotte Grant and the 2022 grant holder of the Beckers Art Award (Beckers Konstnärsstipendium). Laleh Kazemi Veisari holds an MFA in Fine Arts (2019) from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm.
