Artist’s statement:

There is a great feast. The guests are busy doing crazy things and burst out with hysterical laughs. Life here is instinctive, perilous and happy. They are cheerful, open-mouthed, riding the red monster in a garden of kisses. People who are taken for puppets being trembled on the table by Authority; he who grimaces at them. Children are lost in the horror puppet show, surrounded by sinister faces laughing at them. Fathers take their kids to a taxidermy museum where the voracious eyeballs of a dried bird screams in the eyes of children. Even in a neighborhood some blocks further, the police arrive, the siren and red light splash on the dirt ground of night, leaving children of fear roaming in a dead-end alley. Without fail, we are obliged to remain drunk, for the great feast goes on forever.

Installation View:

Press Release:

SooContemporary is pleased to announce BIG BIG PARTY, the first solo exhibition by Sorahi Raafati at the gallery. The show will be on view from June 18 th until July 9th, 2021.
Sorahi’s collages are the observations of a modern girl’s mind, narrating the flow of social life around her. Sorahi lives in Karaj, commuting between Tehran and Karaj. Therefore, her artworks are her observations of some sort and what she sees in dismay.
Attentively, she focused on observing the city’s details: from registering people’s faces on the bus and the sort of social behaviour that’s going on, to commercial billboards along the walls of the city. Details so meticulously illustrated and glued particle by particle with great scrupulosity. Images cut into pieces with scissors, now like a mind unsatisfied with it sees, layer upon layer, with delicacy and in full equilibrium, as in beats of drums, are placed next to one another.
Without a predesigned sketch, Sorahi puts these beats next to each other to build up the rhyme, starting with stained pieces of paper and arranging super tiny details to reach the overall surface. Eventually, she is the narrator of a story risen from her unsaid; humans turned into crooked monsters; tiny leviathans dancing a jig in wedding ceremonies, busy slaughtering; upbeats of police truncheon over people’s heads, trying to diffuse them; forests replete with monkeys and children with mouths wide open, playing. These scenes represent Sorahi’s exhibition with 37 collage paintings along with 6 sculptures. It seems that the decoration process of artworks declare her everyday observations like in a film put semi-fast forwarding.
Among the artworks, are seen small wooden boxes with sculptures of tiny monsters made of play clay, policemen accompanied by rabid dogs, a man with his numerous wives and kids, witches with their cats, a city filled with gloomy houses and a life going on.
Finally though, at the end of the course of the exhibition, one single painting hanging on the wall drags our attention. Its colors are different from other works, shreds of pink and creamy paper, put one next to another with nice light and shadow. Details of two human and beast bodies embraced in full piece, the whole violence of the scissors notwithstanding, staring at the visitor, just to find pieces of a mother embracing her child as if she were Mary Magdalene, right in front of it.