See(d) Artist Series: Shirin Towfiq
353 Grand Ave. Oakland
December 7, 2024
Stepping into the warm, inviting atmosphere of Clio's Books in Oakland, I was struck immediately by the sense of community present. Patrons tucked into cozy corners sipped coffee, discussing their latest literary finds. But it’s not just the books that drew me in. The back room, where the See(d) Artist Series, with Shirin Towfiq was being held, had a distinct, almost otherworldly quality. Jewel-toned carpets covered the floor, and ghostly, almost spectral family photographs, printed on linen, hung from the bookshelves, evoking a sense of history, at once lost and preserved. On nearby tables, delicate Sadaf brand tea bags, each printed with faint images of Persian carpets, lay scattered for inspection, as if inviting viewers to touch and linger, to feel the weight of their significance.
In the midst of this intimate setting, Towfiq stood serenely before a projection screen, fielding questions from the audience. The second-generation Iranian refugee’s work speaks to a family history irrevocably altered by the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Each piece of her art, carefully crafted and imbued with personal significance, offers a reimagining of the stories passed down to her—stories of a homeland she has never known firsthand but whose cultural and emotional legacies she has inherited.
Reimagining Family Lore with Love and Care
Towfiq’s talk was an intimate exploration of the intersection of personal memory and historical rupture. As Towfiq herself described, much of her creative process revolves around the stories her parents shared with her about Iran, a country she has never visited. “These stories might not be accurate,” she said, acknowledging the inherent fluidity of memory and the elusiveness of truth when it comes to oral histories passed down through generations. But it is in this inaccuracy—this inevitable distance from a lived experience—that Towfiq finds the power of her work.
If the Bardic traditions of the world rely on stories being passed down verbatim, Towfiq’s practice is the antithesis of this. She acknowledges that the stories she inherited are shaped by time, loss, and the act of retelling, and she embraces the way these distortions evolve. The artist’s work becomes, then, a kind of personal mythology, a reimagining of family lore through the lens of both absence and reverence.
The Language of Objects: Textiles, Tea Bags, and Projections
Towfiq’s materials are integral to her exploration of displacement. The tea bags, printed with faint representations of Persian carpets, offer a tactile connection to the past, while the act of sewing them together speaks to the ways in which cultural practices are often reassembled in new forms. The embroidered motifs, while delicate, evoke the strength of the traditions they represent. Through them, Towfiq creates a visual and conceptual bridge between the fragmented memories of her family and the larger narrative of Iranian cultural heritage, a heritage that feels both present and elusive.
She showed an image of an installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts earlier in the year—69 prints of Persian carpets on silk gauze so light that they stir at the slightest movement—presenting a striking tension between the visible and the unseen. The images, blurry and partially obscured, seem like memories themselves—faded and dreamlike, as if they are slipping away just as the viewer tries to grasp them. Towfiq explained that gauze originated in Gaza and reflects how interesting it is that a material meant to heal the body should come from somewhere where the people are the most vulnerable. The ghostliness of the photographs is not merely an aesthetic choice but an expression of how history, particularly a history that is not one’s own, is often elusive and fragmented.
The carpets feature frequently in her work. Towfiq explained that the magic carpets in folklore are woven with old threads from around the world, imbuing the textiles with the ability to transport their riders to anywhere, at any time.
An Act of Love and Loss
Towfiq spoke openly about her desire to honor the memory of a country she has never known way her parents did. Her work is an offering, a gesture to reclaim something that was taken away, to connect with a past that feels both deeply familiar and yet out of reach.
This theme of loss, however, is not one of despair. Towfiq’s pieces suggest resilience—through the thread of embroidery, the warmth of the tea bags, and the slow, deliberate process of collecting and reframing these familial narratives. In her eyes, each work is an act of resistance: a way to make visible what has been erased or forgotten by both the passage of time and the political forces that reshaped her family’s world. The work is almost playful at times. Towfiq described an ongoing project with her father entitled “How to Make it”. Each month she asks him how to make something from his childhood over the phone. She then sketches it and then tries to recreate it to the best of her ability. Her father does the same. The resulting objects (kites and children's toys) sitting side by side are an endearing reminder of what is gained and lost in the value of inaccuracy.
Conclusion: A Quiet Revolution of Memory
Towfiq’s talk proved to be a moving and thought-provoking experience. Not just an artist talk, but an invitation to reflect on the ways memory, family, and culture are intertwined and reshaped across generations, and Towfiq’s works, intimate and profoundly personal, speak to a broader, universal story of displacement and the search for belonging. They are a testament to the power of art to reimagine and reconstruct the narratives that shape us, even when those narratives are fractured by history.
As the event concluded, I left Clio’s Books with a sense of connection—not just to Towfiq’s work, but to the histories and stories that exist within each of us. In a world increasingly defined by migration and exile, Towfiq’s work serves as a poignant reminder of the resilience of memory and the transformative power of storytelling.
See(d) Artist Series will continue to feature local and international artists. Stay tuned for their upcoming talk with Macro Waves, a Bay Area CA-based creative collective made of artists, designers, and technologists of color, producing experiences centered on social practice, conceptual art, new media and design.
To learn more about See(d) visit their website.
