In Our Bones by Fariba Boroufar

Gallery Isabelle is pleased to announce an exhibition “In our bones by Fariba Boroufar.”

As a child, the artist Fariba Boroufar took advantage of the drawing classes offered by Kanoon e Parvaresh e Fekri, an arts institute for children in her native Iran. She’d submit drawings according to a prompt—say ‘draw a horse’—and receive feedback from Kanoon’s band of inspired teachers. She took this feedback very seriously; it was, if you will, an early encounter with art criticism.

Still, she didn’t exactly set out to be a visual artist. Her family deemed it too impractical. Why shouldn’t she become a doctor, like her sisters? She opted to study graphic design at university instead—a sensible choice—and spent the ensuing years both working for newspapers and designing children’s books. It was only after a move from Mashhad, where she had been living for a decade, back to her native Tehran, that she switched gears and took up weaving, apprenticing herself to a friend who had mastered the art. For Iranians, weaving, and rug-making, were in her own words, “in our bones.”

Boroufar’s weaves are uncanny. They remind us of elements of the built environment via a correspondence that is subtle, ambiguous, pleasing. Gaze at two tall and skinny structures she has woven long enough and you may see a pair of wind towers, known as bad-gir, a form of vernacular architecture for cooling structures in the desert. Elsewhere, a clump of hexagons—also woven—begins to evoke the delicate tile work one might find in the great mosques of Esfahan. Another work takes inspiration from gaalipoush, the ancient practice of covering roofs with leaves in the northern Caspian Sea region—an architectural gesture but also a psychic one: nature in the service of healing, protecting.

Boroufar’s interest in architecture blossomed in the early days of her marriage, when she and her husband would travel to far-flung corners of the country to view the rarest of marvels in Yazd, Naeen, Esfahan, Shush, Birjand, and Ghazvin. In these places, they might track down a rare qanat, an ancient irrigation channel indigenous to Iran, or happen upon an idiosyncratic mosque in the middle of nowhere. From these adventures came an appreciation for Iran’s formidable architectural history—its iconicity, heart-stopping beauty, and attention to context. But with that also came an unshakable melancholy over the wages of modernization.