Nina Ghanbarzadeh

This is Written in Farsi (2018)
archival pen on paper
52 x 52 in.

Nina Ghanbarzadeh who lives between two cultures (American-Persian) finds herself translating constantly. She tries to avoid this by situating text as a place for shifting perspectives in her art. Juxtaposing the opposite directions in which English and Farsi languages are written and also challenging the viewers are the main goals for creating this drawing. In this work, the ideas of truth vs. facts are put into test. The truth is that the viewers read “This is written in Farsi” in English at a distance. But with a closer examination, they find out that the sentence is written in Farsi and not English. What they read in English is the word by word translation from Farsi. So, the facts that are written in Farsi create the truth in English. Or could it be the other way around?

© Nina Ghanbarzadeh