"Leafing through a book on Iranian art history, I stop at a 19th century oil painting. A golden yellow bird, wings half-opened, head down and legs in the air. Eyes closed, lying on his back, on a wooden board; the bird was driven out."
In nostalgia for the gol-o-morgh (rose and nightingale) motif of the previous century, Kamal-ol-Molk painted, on the king's commission, this bird "which he painted as well as the beautiful paintings of the West" as it is written at the bottom left of the painting. Kamal-ol-Molk is the ancestor of Samira Ahmadi Ghotbi.
Samira Ahmadi Ghotbi continues her studies at the Fine Arts School of Clermont-Ferrand, after studying painting at the Faculty of Art and Architecture of Tehran. As part of the 3rd cycle of the Research Cooperative, it wishes to make the history and memory of a territory that is now distant to it visible and readable. This geographical distance arouses in her a desire and a need for sharing and transmission. It was the basis for the design and realization of works that had history as their own object and subject of research.
Through a practice of performance, video and painting, Samira Ahmadi Ghotbi appropriates family or cultural stories, small or forgotten, to reveal an impalpable image that oscillates between the past and the present.
Samira Ahmadi Ghotbi (Iran/France) is a laureate of the Visual Arts Commissions of the Cité internationale des arts