Claire Luna, French curator and art critic, exchanges with Iranian artist Zohreh Zavareh, about her new staging: curtain-raising on some mysterious characters to whom the ventriloquist artist gives a silent speech in a slowed down time. Some of them, such as Le chien plat (The Flat Dog), Le roi mou (The Soft King) ou Le conte ordinaire (The Ordinary Tale), have already an important role at the Salon de Montrouge. On the occasion of his first solo exhibition at the Terrasse, an art space in Nanterre – Le nom chien plat et autres histoires (The name flat dog and other stories) –, the artist made a new audition in order to enlarge the herd and mix them with other stories where the absent ones are not always wrong.
For this Side to Side, Claire Luna and Zohreh Zavareh went on site and invite you to get to know these new protagonists victims of lock down.
A montage of sounds and images by Chedly Atallah (Tunisia), recipient of the "Daniel & Nina Carasso Foundation & Cité internationale des arts" program.
Graduated in modern and contemporary art history from the Sorbonne Paris IV, Claire Luna is an art critic and independent curator. She has carried out her research in the United States (New York) and in many South American countries (Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Paraguay, Uruguay) with whom she works very regularly. In addition to her interest in non-Western art scenes, she seeks to identify what she could identify as a trend or subject in contemporary art, often at the crossroads of different fields of study and encounters. She is particularly interested in the idea of displacement. That of the gaze and that of bodies at work in our thinking and in our relationship to the world. She is in search of the re-enchantment of our time through poetry, belief or the sacred.
A member of CEA, AICA, Jeunes Critiques d'art and YACI's Latin American Development Officer, she recently completed a writing and research residency at AL LADO in Peru with collectors Ginette Lumbroso and Alberto Rebaza.
Correspondent in New York, then in Paris, for the Latin American contemporary art magazines Artealdia and Artmotiv, she now collaborates with La vie des idées (the magazine of the Collège de France), Le Quotidien de l'Art and Artpress, for whom she has published her Peruvian Chronicles since her residency in Lima and recently participated in the special issue devoted to Latin America.
In 2020, Claire Luna is associate curator of the exhibition Sens-fiction at the Tripostal in Lille.
Claire Luna (France) is recipient of the "Cité internationale des arts & Centre national des arts plastiques" program.
Born in Teheran in 1985, graduate of the Ecole Supérieure d'Art de Clermont Métropole.
Zohreh Zavareh draws from the theater the plastic codes that nourish her practice. Objects belonging to everyday life come alive to speak and bear witness to the world around us. Close to an animist conception, she invests these unexpected protagonists who inhabit our spaces with plastic meanings.
Attentive to her environment, Zohreh Zavareh wants to reveal all its beauty through the detour of fiction. Her approach is based on a work of writing that develops the replicas of the narrative made by the objects. These are all elements given by the artist so that each visitor builds a narrative that gives life to these objects and questions our reality.
Zohreh Zavareh is the recipient of the prize of the Hauts-de-Seine Departmental Council at the 64th Salon de Montrouge.
Zohreh Zavareh (Iran) is recipient of the TRAME and CAPSULE programs of the Cité internationale des arts.
With the support of the Antoine de Galbert Foundation.