The Bildhalle has represented Sissi Farassat since 2018 and is now pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the gallery, for which the artist has almost exclusively created new works. «The pictures that Sissi Farassat chooses for her works are mostly autobiographical, such as self-portraits and photographs of female family members, sometimes also found snapshots. The photographs - potentially innumerable prints are possible in photography - are transformed into individual pieces through elaborate work with pearls, crystals, sequins and threads. These not only reflect the artist`s personal history, but also take up the heritage of Persian carpet knotting and embroidery as well as the tradition of Viennese craftsmanship and design. Sissi Farassat thus achieves a fusion on its own: She combines appropriation art and photography with craftsmanship, reflects with a feminist approach the gaze through the camera lens on women as well as on the art of embroidery, weaving and sewing associated with femininity.In the fast-moving present, this time-consuming manual work possesses something anachronistic, even subversive. Sissi Farassat connects embroidery with the oriental culture she comes from. With a meditative-concentrated activity carried out in peace, which reveals perseverance and the desire to put on a second layer or level. A layer that either hides, emphasizes, or exaggerates what lies beneath it - the overview that photography supposedly provides - or at least provides it with an unimagined brilliance. The artist`s self-portrait and the image of the women in her family are covered or isolated and emphasized by ornamentation - thus linking her intimacy with our voyeurism.
Nadine Olonetzky, October 2019
The artist, who was born in 1969 in Tehran (Iran) and has lived in Vienna since 1978, reflects with her embroidered photographs on the one hand the medium of photography itself, on the other the image of the woman in the photography and beyond that also her own origin. Sissi Farassat`s works have been exhibited internationally and are represented in a number of important private and institutional collections such as the Fotomuseum Winterthur, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, the Sammlung der Stadt Linz as well as the Sammlung der Stadt Wien.
