Life on the edge of pain — Negin Mahzoun

Life on the edge of pain

I suffer from something that is the consequence of psychological and physical damages, the damages with epidemic nature, and can turn from me to us.

The pain hurts; it saddens me.

Our life as a woman is accompanied by pain. We born with pain and love. We grow up with pain. The pain grows with us. The pain becomes bigger than us, more extensive and more significant, and we get lost. Our heads are lost. Our faces are removed. Our breasts are torn and filled with blood, and our tears dry, but our voices will remain in the wind's whispers.

Review

Life offers just one guarantee—a variety of infinite possibilities and potential experiences often shaped by who and what we are. Iranian born artist Negin Mahzoun’s latest series of works on paper, Life on the Edge of Pain is at once a testament too and a meditative lamentation on her experiences and observations as a woman in a world we all share but experience in wildly different ways.

At first glance the amorphous forms of reddish pink watercolors seem like tentative steps toward a dystopian abstraction as they envelope headless female torsos. These incomplete dolls are formed from graphite that bites at the substrate below and sets up a strict binary opposition to the almost fleeting impression of the watercolors.

Gently shaded areolas of breasts and contoured bodies arranged in submissive poses suggest an assumed availability just beyond the womblike barrier. This work preys on false expectations of viewers unwilling to make themselves vulnerable on some empathic level. Remain on the edge or plunge in?

The larger scale works almost force you to identify with the beheaded mannequins while the smaller sizes resemble artifacts of trauma. The materiality of this work lends physical weight to the emotional dimension.

Suspended and tossed about, muted gesticulating forms that become psychological and biological metaphors …they are wombs and red blood cells with non-committal tendrils reaching upward in an inverted reference to menstruation. Here, women, faceless and resilient, tumble in a perpetual cycle of misogyny, societal discrimination and hard won victories for women’s rights across countless generations. It is the pain and pride of womanhood.

This exploration embraces and diffuses the autobiographical nature of pain. The muffled and delicate violence is rooted in Mahzoun’s thesis that “pain grows with us…becomes bigger than us, more extensive and more significant, and we get lost”. From my limited perspective as a male this is one of the more persistent messages of this thought provoking series.

Jonathan Ellis