Past Exhibitions

The SFAC Galleries is pleased to present Part and Parcel, an exhibition in our Main Gallery guest curated by renowned local artist, curator and educator Taraneh Hemami. As a member of the Iranian diaspora, Hemami is interested in fostering an exhibition that takes a look at geographies of belonging. What does it mean to belong? How do specific places affect our ability to be included or excluded from belonging?

The four featured artists, Tannaz Farsi, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Sahar Khoury and Minoosh Zomorodinia examine crossings and becomings, systems and processes, nature and language, time and histories, and remnants of the everyday, in their multidisciplinary projects. Gelare Khoshgozaran, an interdisciplinary artist and writer, presents a new installation that harkens back to a previous project featuring internally-illuminated packages sent back and forth from California to Iran. In Bay Area-based artist Minoosh Zomorodinia’s new two-channel video the artist is depicted standing alone in epic natural landscapes facing into strong winds that press a silver safety blanket against her body. For her Bay Area debut, Oregon-based artist Tannaz Farsi will be installing works from her recent solo exhibition, Points of Departure. For a large wall-work, Farsi displays the names of Iranian women, historical and contemporary, creating a visible and accountable document of women's public intellectual labor in Iran and abroad. Sahar Khoury, an Oakland-based artist, will produce a new installation of hybrid sculptural works for the exhibition that bring attention to key historical dates in the Iran/US relationship of the past four decades.

Bay Area photographer Youngsuk Suh spent eight years working on his photo-based series, Wildfires. Far from documentary shots, Suh’s lush and languid images take the viewer from the comfortable position of being just out of the fire’s path, to standing within feet of the source. The artist exploits these positions of perspective to play on natural human feelings of both compulsion to and fear of nature. This “anxious desire” is the primary focus of his photographs.

Although they are the output of a destructive force, smoke and haze are irresistibly beautiful. Suh takes full advantage of this romantic attraction by emphasizing ash-filled rosy skies and billowing white plumes. The dramatic nature of Suh’s photographs lies in a tense and eerie stillness captured on the fringes of Northern California’s most devastating fires, after the flames have subsided or in anticipation of its potential arrival. Suh elegantly communicates the balance between the tranquility of the moment and what is on the horizon.  

Conversation is an ongoing series of exhibitions that features a substantive body of work by a local artist alongside work by an artist based in another point on the globe. Conversation 7 brings together work by local artist Marcela Pardo Ariza and New York-based artist Farah Al Qasimi. Marcela Pardo Ariza’s practice explores queerness and representation, using photography as a means to reveal the construction of persona and identity—both public and personal. For Conversation 7, the Colombian-born artist collaborated with Bay Area queer performers, including Julie Tolentino, Xandra Ibarra, Juliana Delgado Lopera, and more, to explore the relationship between movement-based performers/artists and photography. Farah Al Qasimi’s work draws upon her communities in both the United States and the United Arab Emirates. Through a careful framing of her subjects, Al Qasimi is able to subvert the assumptions of what it is to be Arab and to live in the Arabian Gulf with a subtle yet potent sense of humor and a great deal of empathy. In her images, figures obscure themselves or tenderly interact with each other. The photographs show the vulnerability of her subjects and challenge depictions of Arab and Southeastern Asians in Western media.