Week 10 – Artist Conversation #4 – Mahsa Soroudi
Artist: Mahsa Soroudi Exhibition: 7500 miles Media: N/A Gallery: Mahsa Soroudi Interview by Glenn Zucman Youtube Channel Website: http://www.mahsasoroudi.com Instagram: N/A
The artist that was in Glenn Zucman’s YT channel was Mahsa Soroudi and she was born in Iran that has lived in Malaysia for a year and has been living for 9 years in California since her interview was posted in 2016 and it is now 2020. She isn’t a student from CSULB and because of it she isn’t in any program from the CSULB campus but she does have a website of her artworks. Soroudi’s interests is to show how her situation of moving to different nations is the same as how her plants have thrived and showing how you can survive. The ideas that Soroudi’s work is to show that there really isn’t a default theme of Iran like how the Western world usually thinks of Iran. Soroudi wanted to show how she Doen’t really feel like she is at “home” when she is currently living in California.
The form of the artwork was pretty normal and medium-sized since I was seeing at the artwork on my computer because of the coronavirus situation that is going on around the world. For the artwork on the top left corner it had dull and bright colors that was used for it while the artwork on the bottom right corner had only dull colors but it was painted to look like it was bright. The top left corner artwork has two people that are curled up in a fetus position but at the same time it looks like smoke and it was undulating because the curves that make up the human bodies are smooth. The artworks were normal and medium sized since I was able to look at them through my computer screen and looking at the artwork made me see how Soroudi said she actually felt. I didn’t see all of Soroudi’s artwork but these artworks caught my eye because they had familiar shapes and showed familiar objects that you usually see in your everyday life.
Soroudi talked about how her artwork is to show how she doesn’t really feel like she is really at home while she moved to the US and to show how Iran is actually really is. She said that her father was a painter while they lived in Tehran so that made her inspired to do all of the artworks that she has done and to show how she had to survive. In the interview she talks about how she feels disconnected and how her parents liked art in different forms and they traveled to different asian countries that were in the vicinity of her homeland. She and her family would watch a lot of movies from Hollywood and so that made her aware and knowledgeable of a lot and different cultures and in her homeland Tehran there is a lot of different areas that give different experiences. Soroudi talks about how she and her husband share an interest in moving from Iran and they have lived in Malaysia for a year and that gave her a better insight in the different places that are around the whole world.
I think that Soroudi’s artworks showed a familiarity of her homeland Tehran and the distance of how she felt in the other countries that she has lived in. Soroudi’s idea resonates with mine because I also feel like I don’t really belong in this country since I have been exposed to the bad things about this country and seeing how the other countries are makes me want to live in them. The formal nature of these artworks resonates with me because when I look at these artworks I feel comfortable and a sense of home when I really stare at them. My life experience resonates with Soroudi’s artworks because I have seen videos of other countries and I was feel like I belong in the other countries and not in the US but my parents came to this country before I was born so I couldn’t relate to her on that level. My academic experience also resonates with her artworks because I am learning how to speak, write, and read in Chinese and my major is Chinese Studies B.A. so when I heard what she said on the interview it made see why I chose the major that I chose and that was because I didn’t really feel at “home” in the US which is my home country.
Jorge Mendez Milian 