Artist Statement

Exhibition. Le Cube Garges, April 27 – May 18

2020
Installation, interactive, moving and sound sculpture

The statuary bodies of the Franco-Iranian artist Yosra Mojtahedi make indistinct the borders separating the human from the non-human, the animated from the inanimous, the mythological from the prospective. The Erosorbenus, this oxymoronic and innovative piece, attracts and repels, fascinates and alerts in an assumed technological baroque. She combines soft robotics, ceramics and programming, in a sculpture that emerges from obscurity. The Erosorbenus is a hybrid, sensual and vegetal body on which robos cling

The Erosarbenus is a body, a tree, a sensual sculpture that calls for touch. Inspired by the richness of plant forms and human anatomy, the artist Yosra Mojtahedi questions through her works the boundary between living and non-living. In order to convey the sensation of life, the artist worked with the DEFROST laboratory at INRIA,specialized in soft robots, soft and flexible robots powered by an air blowing system. Like a flower that opens, the work offers an organic appearance whose realization called on the four elements: earth, fire (ceramic firing), liquid, air. Erosarbenus breathes, it also sings. Drawing on her Persian and Kurdish roots, the artist summons traditional songs to transform the sculpture into a sounding board for these songs forbidden to women in Iran. In the room floats a heady and sensual smell of rose, an emblematic perfume of Persian civilization.

Production: Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains In partnership with Elnria – Defrost (Deformable Robotic Software) ADAGP Digital Art Revelation Prize 2020.
http://www.yosramojtahedi.com

• Yosra Mojtahedi was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1986. A graduate of Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains (FR), she explores different fields of art, science and technology (particularly Soft robotics – Deformable robots), with a look at anthropology. She studies humans in all their aspects, both physical and cultural (social, religious, psychological) and their relationships with nature. In the form of sculptural and interactive installations, drawings or photographs, organic, sensual and mystical landscapes appear. It bathes in a surreal atmosphere, a space freed from place and time, where objects and elements are symbolic: flowers, stones, umbilical cords, organs, bathed in twilight darkness. Following her research around nature, and also the place of the human body (and more particularly the female body) in society, she questions the border between the living and the non-living through sculptures considered as “machine-human”. Coming from a country where the body is a taboo subject and its representation prohibited, her works are in sensual and sensory reaction: tactile, olfactory, sometimes touching on eroticism. http://www.yosramojtahedi.com