BLINK // Ashkan Honarvar Paper Prosthetics

BLINK is a series of micro-posts that will focus on individual artists. Honing in on select work or works, each post will be a fleeting snapshot of art activity from around the world, one that hopefully inspires and prompts deeper investigations.
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Ashkan Honarvar – “Identity Lost 7” (2013), handmade collage, 16 x 23 cm; copyright of the artist

In Ashkan Honarvar’s works, bodies and images are dissected and glued together into chimerical collaged representations of the human body. By seamlessly splicing the different fragments, his images evoke an uncanny sensation of wholeness despite the rational awareness that these works are surreal constructions from many disparate parts. Similarly, Honarvar ruptures the illusion of the unified human form to reveal a nightmarish fantasy of dissected bodily parts in biomorphic arrangements of flowers, textures, internal organs, and inanimate objects. Honarvar’s graphic and often violent collages are undeniably beautiful, creating a complex intersection between the aesthetic visual experience of the body and its physical form. By mimicking the process of disfigurement in both the medium of collage and his subject matter, Honarvar reveals the relationship between the physical human body, and its representation and perception.

Ashkan Honarvar – “Age of Adz” (2011), handmade collage, 10 x 22 cm; copyright of the artist

Honarvar explores how the unity of the body has been ruptured as a result of technology and modernity. The desire to locate a whole, indivisible body is constantly frustrated by all its new transformations: virtual extensions, photographic and film manipulations, surgical intrusions, and physical distortions. Honarvar presents these prosthetics as a form of adornment, an optical modification of the body that affects the way the body is perceived. The result is shocking; a tearing, dissecting, and exploding of the human form which results in a traumatic displacement of identity since the body can no longer be located in the image we expect.