Emmy Hennings / Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi | Mousse

In Episode 4 (The Embarrassment) (2021) the flowers are hung with a trio of used cigarette butts and metallic-pink block-heeled boots against an expanse of red latex. Viewed sequentially, the subtitles of this series sketch out a pithy narrative of class consciousness: Episode 1 (Acting Elite), Episode 2 (Spiritual Growth), Episode 3 (Anger Management), Episode 4 (The Embarrassment), Episode 5 (Permanent Force). In another body of work that responds to the forgotten legacy of writer and Cabaret Voltaire cofounder Emmy Hemmings, a stylized bloom is repeated to become a large-scale, handsomely retro print. Extending the fetish-but-make-it-syndicalist palette, this floral pattern is printed onto black cotton fabric used as the backdrop of vitrine installations like Showcase (Flower 1) (2020) and cast in black lace in Leila (2020). The latter was hung in the window above the entrance of Swiss Institute, New York, for her show Emmy Hennings / Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi (2020), and seen from outside, the curtains suggested nothing so much as the chiaroscuro of mashrabiya or jaali latticework.

In Ghaznawi’s numbered Pillar and Sculpture series (2020), the same fake roses are tucked into heavy chains suspended from the ceiling, or among angled steel rods interwoven with fabric scraps, diamante strips, sateen, gingham or animal print ribbons, ball chains, and various faux-gilt jewelry that some might see as lowbrow or tacky. Some 2021 iterations of these ropelike works bear the title Family Intervention and the name of a female friend or family member. A pair of collages upon burned dress shirts, Male Extinction 1 and Male Extinction 2 (both 2021), further hint at a world depopulated of presumably cis men (why not?), while the series entitled Vulgar Collages (2019–ongoing) makes overt the artist’s interest in material hierarchies.

Ghaznawi’s deployment of mass-produced petro-textiles and cheap haberdashery is as precise as it is evocative. She makes no attempt to upcycle or otherwise smooth over her materials’ humble origins. Rather, their mobilization in institutional contexts highlights just how constructed, classist—and by extension racialized—are normative Western notions of good taste. In this, the works serve as bulwarks against the pervasive post-Enlightenment tendency to erase difference—the linguistic and cultural practices of recent immigrants, for example—through homogenization and assimilation. Contra the impulse to read a non-Western artist through their background—and in some artists’ cases, to perform alterity or a marginalized identity—Ghaznawi is purposefully spare in her provision of biographical details. She was born in Ghazni, a small city in southeastern Afghanistan, and now lives and works in Zurich. Commissioned texts that accompany her exhibitions are similarly opaque, eschewing explanation or context in favor of aphoristic poetry or quasi-manifestos containing lines like: “You wanna spend the nights with me or only with the idea of me? You think my black hair comes as decoration?”Or: “We have no time for your crocodile tears. Not for any Karen and also not for any extension of a Karen. Bye.”¹

But the artist’s upbringing nevertheless quietly speaks in her choice of materials, which are drawn from her lived experience. Western European aesthetics are equally present in the framing and armatures of works like Bookshelf 2 (empty, fragile) (2020), in which empty aluminum shelves bisect roses-and-lace-printed wallpaper. Instead of opening on this visual regime’s obsolescence, the work’s caption devastatingly denotes the medium with the single word “dust.” At Swiss Institute her vitrines evinced an interest in museological aesthetics and the institutional construction of power, particularly through exhibition architecture and industrial design.