Ghazaliyat

Farnaz Dadfar is an Iranian-born Australian artist, based in Melbourne. She has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Iran, Australia and Indonesia since 2004. Beside exhibiting in many galleries and venues, Dadfar was selected as one of the finalists for the Linden Art Prize 2019, Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship, and she has been the recipient of a number of awards. Farnaz Dadfar’s practice offers a small window into an alternative realm of spiritual and philosophical experience by recuperating certain characteristics of Persian Sufi poetry and Farsi literature as artistic material. Ghazaliyat experientially re-presents certain aspects of Islamic mysticism within the context of contemporary post-conceptual art. By activating meanings and nonsenses created through fragmented linguistic diasporas using text selected poems from the Dīvāni Shamsi Tabrīz by Mawlānā Jalāl ad-Dîn Rūmī as a means of incarnating otherness, deterritorialisation and displacement, the project imagines utopic alternatives to the increasingly brutal and dystopic realities of twenty-first century existence.