It has taken Nogol Mazloumi, exactly One thousand three hundred sixty Hours and twenty-one minutes to complete the startlingly powerful drawings of this exhibition. It is an archaic attitude, one that is retention of an age old practice of Iranian artists and their interest in pen and ink drawing which is well documented to Il-Khanid period (1256-1353 AD). For centuries Iranian artists, in their solitude, have created marvelous imagery, a separate world where they have found the redeeming answer to brutality chaos and frustration that seems always to have been a part of daily life.
Nogol Mazloumi is preoccupied with notion of death and non existence. For the catalogue she writes: The notion of before and after life which is incomprehensible to us, is void. Death is a boundless void, and in its intervals life exists. Death is not performed and is not a position, it’s devoid of any act. But it contains all acts because it engulfs life. In reality It is life that happens. So in this way death is both life and it is not.
In these breath taking drawings, artist creates life and beauty out of her fixation with death. Through her lines music flows and the harmony which the eye enjoys as it passes to and fro over the compositions is soothing. Here is Phoenix rising from ashes, phoenix who is believed to possess the knowledge of all times and the netherworld. From ashes she arises to create life and wonderment. She plunges in to flames to be purified and to rise again. It is this self renewing quality in Iranian art that has been the merit and source of its survival through dark times with artists who have boldly faced their own demons and have risen above expectations, each time stronger, each time mightier.