Golnar Adili: A Play Mountain

April 13 - May 18, 2024

Over the last two decades, artist Golnar Adili has mined her own family’s past—a history forged by political revolution, exile, and diasporic belonging. Born in the United States, Adili grew up in Iran after she returned with her parents to their home country in the wake of the 1979 Revolution. The aftermath of this revolution forced her father, a leftist activist, to return to the United States as a political exile. This exile fractured her family for many years. Across a range of mixed media, Adili materializes the lived experience of her diasporic identity. In particular, she works with the languages of the Iranian diaspora (from 14th-century Persian poetry, Persian didactic texts, to her family’s letters) and creates what the artist calls her visual and spatial

“lexicon of displacement.”

A Play Mountain is part sculpture, part model based on a place that has appeared in a recurring dream Adili has had since childhood. This place merges architecture’s basic forms—stair, column, ground plane—with the ascending and descending contours of landscape. With the kinds of material an architect might use in the design process, the artist translates a world first constructed in her inner mind for public experience in the here and now. Like all constructions of the mind, A Play Mountain turns on the blurring line between the imagined and real. And for this presentation, Adili has modified Blind Alley’s glass window to frame the larger encounter with artifice, reality, and the world conjured by the work.

Artist bio:

Golnar Adili (b. 1976, USA) is an Iranian American artist, designer, and teacher based in Brooklyn, New York. Adili holds a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and has participated in residencies with the Rockefeller Foundation for the Arts (Bellagio, Italy), Center for Book Arts (NYC), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), MacDowell (NYC), Ucross Foundation for the Arts (Clearmont, WY), Lower East Side Printshop (NYC), Women’s Studio Workshop (Rosendale, NY), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace (NYC), among others. Her work has been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions organized by institutions such as: the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), NURTUREart (Brooklyn, NY), Craft and Folk Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA), and International Print Center New York (NYC). She is the past recipient of major grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, NYFA, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2021, Adili was a finalist for the Jameel Prize, sponsored by the Victoria & Albert Museum and Art Jameel. Her artist books are in several collections, including the Library of Congress, Rutgers University, Yale University, and the University of Michigan.

Curator’s bio:

Jamin An is an art historian based in Fort Worth, Texas. He teaches the history, theory, and criticism of late modernism and contemporary art. His current research projects include a study of the curator Henry Geldzahler in the 1960s and the use of published books in recent art. He is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the TCU School of Art, where he also holds the Deedie Potter Rose Chair of Contemporary Art

History.