Translation of the article to English by Kasper Vuorinen.
Laughter releases the invisible
Iran-born artist Aishe Vejdani´s new painting series is shown in B-gallery in Turku, and its theme is generational transmission of the traumatic past, tragedy, which took place in the area of former Soviet Union, nowadays Turkmenistan.
If there is major family tragedy in the past, it will be transferred to the next generations through stories and narratives. In this case, artist Vejdani wanted to visualize her family´s traumatic past to the canvas, but soon realizes she couldn´t do that. Family´s narrative was the story of men, and women were not included.
Vejdani has already before studied women´s role in historical perspective in her art works. A couple years ago, artist unified the art of Finnish “national book” of Kalevala to the Iranian book Shahnameh´s visuality in order to build cultural bridge between these two cultures and countries, Iran and Finland.
In the art show in B-gallery, there is video of Vejdani´s family men travelling to Turkmenistan and also artist´s oil paintings, which are clusters of laughing women faces. In one big art work, there is dialogue between paintings and video, because exhibition is build in a way that video of grieving men is spotlighted to the center of big canvas, which pierces the ranks of laughing faces.
Surroundings of hurtful past rises the feelings of silence, secretion and contradictions. Woman, who cannot relate to the sorrow, laughs. Scientific research of sense of humor defines laugh many times as surplus reaction. Sigmund Freud linked laughter to the theory of reprieve.
Vejdani´s oil paintings of laughing figures on the white canvases feels to highlight and reveal antagonisms, contradictions, which communities cannot handle or control. Laughter releases the woman who lives in nonhistorical state of past family trauma, and whose gender and discourse remains invisible.
Positive, purifying laughter attempts to create something new. Next, Vejdani starts to study the memories of grandmother, and her so-far silent narrative and role in this family trauma. The aim is to find ways to get into real concrete grief work (of a woman), which erupts as cry, not as hysterical laughter.
Asta Kihlman
