Chohreh Feyzdjou – Documenta 11

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The most moving of such projects is surely the installation of Chohreh Feyzdjou's life-work, a room filled with crates, racks of jars, drawers, tatty old boxes and dozens of rolled-up canvases and drawings. It seems that everything she ever did is here, and everything has been rubbed and coated in blackness - the nubs of charcoal, and the balls and wads of blackened cheesecloth and brushes are here, too. Every item, every jar, roll and box carries a small, pink, printed label, reading: "Products of Chohreh Feyzdjou." She was born in 1955 to Jewish émigrés in Tehran; her father changed the family name from Cohen to the common Persian name Feyzdjou. When, as an adult, the artist moved to Paris, she was told her name was unpronounceable and that she should change it again. This poignant anecdote, one of the few pieces of information available on Feyzdjou, who died in 1996, makes us read her work in terms of identity and its self-erasure. There is a lot of art around that pays lip-service to questions of identity. This is more than that. There's nothing to be done with her art, except to feel a certain pain.
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from
Adrain Searle – Being here now. Documenta's sprawling collection of art from around the globe is as fascinating and flawed as the world reflects. (About Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany, 2002)
Guardian, 23 July 2002

photograph
Chohreh Feyzdjou – Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou, from Série B
B007.88, 1990, (cire, pigment, fil), 2 x 4 cm, collection Peter Foolen