Aileen Bahmanipour: Wasting Techniques

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Aileen Bahmanipour, "Wasting Techniques," 2021

Aileen Bahmanipour is both image-maker and image-breaker in Wasting Techniques at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art

In her exhibition, the Iranian-Canadian artist creates a series of complex drawings on clear acetate sheets, filling the space with manipulated drawings of diagrams and useful tools. Rendering the collection of overlapping drawings as illegible, messy scribbles, the artist has created what she describes as “useless drawings” that contradict the very purpose of drawing, which is to have something the viewer is able to see.

Using a “spitting machine” the artworks are regularly sprayed with squirts of water, which will overtime wash away the drawings and turn them into stains on the floor. Visitors will have multiple ways to interact with this exhibition, either in person, or over a live stream through 2 cameras the artist has set up, one in front of the transparent sheet and one behind.

“We are intrigued to see the evolution of this exhibition over the next 6 weeks as the artworks change and transform from the spitting machine. Bahmanipour has created an exhibition that avoids being static by not only the transformative quality of the work, but the multiple access points for visitors to experience it.” (Artistic and Administrative Director, Lorna McParland).

Wasting Techniques will be on view in the Main Gallery of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art from January 29 to March 13, 2021. Visitors will also have an opportunity to learn more about Bahmanipour at our upcoming artist talk with the artist via zoom on February 18. To learn more and register to participate please visit our website at www.alternatorcentre.com

Aileen Bahmanipour: Wasting Techniques

I am both the image-maker and image-breaker as I make things in order to destroy. In this order, I think about “wasting techniques” [1] : those which involve carving away a piece of material until the shape we want remains. These are also common techniques in subtractive industrial processes, for example in milling machines and extraction tools.  

I accumulate, manipulate, and trace explanatory diagrams of these useful tools to make diagrammatic drawings on a clear acetate sheet; they become scribbles, illegible, messy, sloppy marks. Leaving minimum negative space on the ground of the image, I turn that ground into an entire positive space, all occupied by drawings, to the point that I can’t see what I am drawing. So, I contradict the very purpose of Drawing, which is to see, to look at things. 

There is a machine, titled Spitting Machine, that squirts water to the Diagrams of Wasting Techniques and gradually washes them away and turning them into stains on the floor. “Visitors” [2] can see the process through two cameras in front and behind the drawings. The repetitive washing of the drawings creates a transparency for the visitors’ lens. This clear ground of the image allows the image to shift into a more transparent relationship through visitors’ participation in the act of looking.

Aileen Bahmanipour is an Iranian-Canadian artist. She has received her BFA in Painting from the Art University of Tehran and MFA in Visual arts from the University of British Columbia. Bahmanipour has exhibited her work in a body of solo and group exhibitions in Iran as well as in Canada, including her solo and group exhibitions at Vancouver’s grunt gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Gallery 1515, Hatch Art Gallery, and Two Rivers Gallery.

She is the recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant in 2017, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Artist in 2019, and the Early Career Development grant from BC Arts Council in 2019.

Bahmanipour’s practice is currently centred on exploring contemporary forms of Iconoclasm. She defines Iconoclasm not to reject or negate the image but to redefine it. To do that, she challenges the figure/ground relations. The ground of the image, through the history of image-making, has been always suppressed and hidden by the covering image. By vandalizing the image, the iconoclast gives an opportunity to the ground of the image to find a language, to become visible, and be part of the image.

Using available imagery and through disturbing the pattern of already established representations, Bahmanipour searches for a new way of perceiving the image and ground of the image. She disturbs the seemingly know quality of images in my works and trouble distinguishing the image from its ground. With situating herself in the existing hybrid dialogues between Western and Eastern perspectives, she challenges the very idea of perspectives in order to reach an anti-perspectival point of view, from which the subject’s understanding of image and the truth behind the image’s appearance can possibly construct a transparent relationship.

I would like to thank Denise Ryner, Yasmin Haiboub, Godfre Leung, Setareh Yasan, and Chris Warren for their kind supports. Also, I would like to thank BC Arts Council and Alternator’s members and staff for giving me the opportunity of exhibiting this work and helping me through the exhibition.

[1] David Pye, The Nature & Aesthetics of Design, Cambium Press, 1999.

[2] This term has been defined by Ali Ahadi as a reconfiguration of the category of audience, spectator, or viewer of an artwork, emphasizing on the subject position as well as the encounter-based relationship the visitor as the art attendee ought to maintain with a work of art. Ali Ahadi, Shit Yes Academy (Goh Ballet Academy) Book, Ag Gallery Press, 2018.