Hoda Zarbaf: Honey, I am home!

Dastan presents a solo exhibition of works by Hoda Zarbaf titled “Honey, I am Home!” at Dastan+2. The exhibition will open on Friday, November 6, 2020 –with a preview on Thursday, November 5, and will be on display for public viewing until November 20. This is Hoda Zarbaf’s first solo show at Dastan, featuring a series of multimedia installations. Hoda Zarbaf (b. 1982, Tehran) has received her BFA in Painting from University of Tehran faculty of Fine Arts, completed her first MFA with a focus on Animation at Tehran University of Art, followed by a second master in Digital Media from University of Windsor (Ontario, Canada). She has made several sculptural series for solo and group exhibitions, while participating in curated exhibitions with sitespecific video art and large-scale installations. Through her practice, Zarbaf raises the notion of memory. She collages discarded, forgotten—and seemingly useless—domestic objects with newly sculpted ceramics, lights, sounds, videos, or patchwork elements, giving them a contemporary narrative. Her works have been featured in various national and international galleries and institutions, namely Toronto’s AGO and Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Her name has also been recently featured in 100 Sculptures of Tomorrow. Hoda Zarbaf’s curatorial team, who have been working closely with her on this project, describe the artist’s renditions of contemporary life in this series as follows: An exhibition of contemporary multimedia installations, “Honey, I am home!” introspectively delves into the ever-present experience of solitude. It's a study on self as personal space through an anamorphic recollection. The current human condition has redefined the concept of “home life,” forcing everyone into inevitable isolation. We have globally cultivated a more intimate relationship with our homes lately, and—more than ever, have become aware of how we exist in our living quarters. In retrospect, this experience has become an endless, loop-like string of moments of consumption that are remembered, informing us of who we are and how we relate to our surrounding space. In this series, Zarbaf depicts her memory's distortion through nostalgic elements, domestic objects, absurd content, play on words, dramatic scales, and layered visuals. She has come to find herself to be morphing into her home in solitude—expanding and extending—due to the continued consumption of content at home: food, data, images, sounds, and stories. Adding a curious meta-narrative, the installations feature their own memory or refer to another piece in the series, together emulating a hyper-real living space where the boundaries of reality and fiction are intentionally blurred.