The art of snow and script

Between the Two, Hamideh Behgar’s current solo show at Aceartinc., is a bridging of worlds.

Iran, her homeland, and Canada, her current home. Persian architecture and Prairie landscape. Past and present. Here, there and in between.

Behgar, 38, came to Winnipeg from Iran in 2021 to earn her MFA at the School of Art at the University of Manitoba, which she completed in 2023.

As she was trying to get a handle on what she might do for her thesis — fine art was a newer practice for her; she has a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from the University of Applied Science & Technology in Kish, Iran — she spent a lot of time walking in King’s Park.

“We have snow in Iran, but you cannot even compare it with what you get in Canada,” she says with a laugh.

“Every day that I went there, I had my camera to take photos, and then I found that I’m getting, somehow, a repetitive pattern of the form of the snow on the ground.”

Behgar especially liked the organic shapes that form in the surface of the snow during freeze-thaw cycles — breaks and cracks and holes. She took black-and-white photos and hung them up in her studio.

The playful sculptural works in her thesis exhibition, 2023’s Embracing Imperfection, took some cues from those organic elements; Behgar wanted to explore the idea of free play and interactivity (not unlike, perhaps, the way one might play in snow).

But after she finished her thesis, those snow photos kept calling out to her. She began experimenting, making digital drawings over top of them.

And then, she had an ‘a-ha’ moment.

“I found these abstract forms that were somehow very similar to Farsi script and Farsi calligraphy… It was something … I don’t know. I felt something.”

“I found these abstract forms that were somehow very similar to Farsi script and Farsi calligraphy. They are not alphabet, you cannot read them. It was something … I don’t know. I felt something,” she says.

“Eventually, I got this visual language from the snow here, and for me it was like, OK, now I’m somehow bringing what I feel, my experiences from the memory, like from everything that I had in Iran, here in the new land that I’m living, and how I can make a bridge between these two lands?”

Those Farsi-inspired shapes can be found throughout the works in Between the Two. As Behgar says, the marks are asemic — meaning they resemble writing but cannot be read — but, as she says in her artist statement, they echo the rhythm of Farsi script.

Behgar was also inspired by the centuries-old art form of Persian miniature painting.

Whole worlds are depicted in these small but finely detailed works, which often accompanied text narratives and are characterized by vivid colours, even light (no shadows) and flat but intricately layered perspective, allowing for multiple narratives to unfold in a single scene.

“Using the Persian miniature, like the layering and everything, came to my mind during that time.”

She’d grown up seeing Persian miniature in Iran, but studying it during a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity this past spring gave her a new perspective. The idea that the stories told in these miniature paintings are multi-layered, not linear, resonated with her.

“Using the Persian miniature, like the layering and everything, came to my mind during that time,” she says.

That time was also difficult. The war between Israel and the U.S. and Iran had just broken out and, while she was in Banff in March, she saw news of the airstrikes hitting Tehran during Nowruz, or the Persian New Year.

“So, it was a very hard time for me. I was alone in the mountains, the time that I should enjoy just being with my cohorts and making art. But somehow it was very hard for me because I had to focus and I wanted to take advantage of the time that I had there. So I just started to produce more and more work. These are all the pieces I made there.”

While her works are more abstract than traditional Persian miniature — which she is not recreating but reinterpreting — they have that same sense of overlap, some created from five or six layers of paper, and borrow from the rich colour palette.

The exhibition includes physical structural elements, such as a window, staircase and curtains, that make you feel as though you’re inside of one of these miniatures. Geometric water fountains and channels, another fixture of Persian miniature, also appear in the abstract here.

Behgar gives her pieces a sense of movement, growth and momentum, but what you see — Farsi script, vines, water, snow prints — is up to you.

“These little pieces, I don’t call them alphabet. I don’t call them forms from the snow. It’s like abstract forms, organic forms, that all the time they are just moving and dancing and flowing.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com