Banafshe Hemmati

Banafsheh Hemmati, an Iranian designer-artist, is a master’s graduate in industrial design and a PhD graduate in the philosophy of art who’s concerned with the relation between art and geometry in her works. She’s founded Banafsheh Hemmati Design Studio in Tehran for more than twenty years and her extensive pursuits in the field of design involve interior, furniture, light, and custom design, and specializing in jewelry, and sculpture. She’s also been teaching design at universities. Her approach in her pieces of jewelry and sculptures can be best described as appropriating Islamic geometry. She strives to desacralize the sanctity of Islamic architecture and secularize its geometry.

Hemmati has shown her works in numerous exhibitions in Iran and abroad. She is the only independent artist at DIFC and recently her installation entitled, “Seven Cypresses,” was showcased in the first near east “Sculpture Park” at DIFC besides artworks from Salvador Dalí and Jeff Koons. She has also attended various festivals as a judge and gained prestigious awards such as the “Florence International Art and Design Competition Award”. Hemmati has been a member of Klimt02 (a platform for the communication of international art jewelry and contemporary crafts) and an author in the Art Jewelry Forum (AJF).

Geometry is fundamental in Iranian-Islamic geometry. In the realm of Islamic art, the matter becomes sanctified through geometry. Girih Tiles which illustrate harmony, balance, substantial order, and purged from any kind of chance and accident is one of the representations of this geometry. These firm and rigid features in Girih Tilles encouraged me to use them as a source of deconstruction. The twist I enacted onto the Girih, which challenges the rationalist geometry, distorted its secure order and arrangement and turned it into a structure. I selected and made 7 angles which can be expanded infinitely regarding the chosen perspective. I didn’t make the main structure and it’s absent but its traces are visible in other structures. In the structures of “The Trace of the Absence” I focused on detaching from the concrete order of the geometry and truth in tradition, creating which is accompanied by desacralization and reconstruction. Any form of truth is dependent on the audience selected perspective which does not last much and loses its order in every change obtaining a new construction.

This image is a reflection of the multiplicity of truths and perceptions that arise from the contemporary perception of the truth, which conflicts with the traditional worldview. My ultimate goal in appropriating these forms’ visual possibilities is to criticize the traditional attitude to geometry and its relationship with truth along with secularizing sacred geometry.