Parvin Peivandi

Threadbare rugs paired with metal plates speak to two cultures.

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A study in contrasts, Parvin Peivandi’s work is symbolic of her life’s path, which started in Iran and continues in Vancouver. The struggles of immigrating to a country with different values and a new language are represented by her use of fragments of threadbare rugs. Their warm but faded colouring and gentle undulations exaggerate their pairing with the cold abruptness of steel plates, cut and folded like paper. The metal represents North American culture – industrial and, perhaps, impenetrable to an outsider. 

She sourced the rugs used in her exhibition, Returning Tenderly Triumphant, on view until Oct. 23 at the Burrard Arts Foundation in Vancouver, on journeys home. Each trip provided a suitcase of tatters, often found in piles about to be discarded, but not before the weavers, mostly women, had plucked out still useful threads to reuse. 

When Peivandi acquires each piece, she considers the work that went into its making – and unmaking. Often, the women live nomadic lives, and the carpets reflect a free flow of ideas and expression, an embodied narrative of the weaver’s life. 

In One Day, Blue was the Sky, clumps of felted wool coated in blue-pigmented wax appear to bubble out of the rug, the oozing effect a metaphor evoking life’s unexpected ruptures. In Armored Heart, a folded square of red-painted steel envelops wavy Iranian sheep’s wool atop a prayer mat. 

While much of the work, including the cut pieces of rug, alludes to formalist structures, the triangles and the use of red are reminiscent of Russian constructivism, in which painting compositions were distilled to geometric shapes. The wool’s earthy softness is a counterbalance. As such, Peivandi has found a poetic way to represent her existence within two cultures. 

Weight of Her Dream, the most literal piece in the exhibition, includes six tiny plastic dolls, girls in gym shorts. In the top left corner, a decal of a pair of cowboy boots is attached to the rug’s surface. While the boots are an obvious reference to Western culture, the girls represent Peivandi’s childhood dream of moving to the West to break free of the constraints facing women in Iran, including the difficulty of playing sports in clothing that restricts physical movement.

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Parvin Peivandi, “Returning Tenderly Triumphant,” 2021

Parvin Peivandi, “Returning Tenderly Triumphant,” 2021

installation view at Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver (photo by Dennis Ha)

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Parvin Peivandi, “Returning Tenderly Triumphant,” 2021

Parvin Peivandi, “Returning Tenderly Triumphant,” 2021

installation view at Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver (photo by Dennis Ha)

Peivandi uses metal as a weight, perhaps as a way of anchoring herself to the life she now lives on the West Coast. All other materials – the rugs, felt, wax and pigment – are sourced in Iran, and they all tug at bodily memory. These materials are handmade or, in the case of the wool and beeswax, come directly from the bodies of animals. The steel, even when folded like paper and placed on the wall as if floating, does not transcend its industrial, impersonal nature, except where it is stitched, like a suture, through hand-punched holes, onto the carpets. 

While the rug symbolizes Peivandi’s body as an Iranian woman, the steel represents forces imposed on the body. She speaks eloquently about sympathizing with the rug weavers and their stories, with the materials themselves, but also with two cultures. She avoids synthesis and allows the characteristics of each culture to speak to the other without hierarchy or conflict. ■  

Parvin Peivandi: Returning Tenderly Triumphant at the Burrard Arts Foundation in Vancouver from Sept. 9 to Oct. 23, 2021.

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