Kismet by Bita Fayyazi installed at Fabrica
Acquired by Luciano Benetton, a profound reflection on the inevitability of destiny
Ponzano, 13 February 2007 – h. 3.40 p.m. CET – The force of destiny, the inescapable forger of the future; this is the theme of Iranian artist Bita Fayyazi’s Kismet installation which Luciano Benetton has purchased. It will be permanently displayed at Fabrica, Benetton Group’s communication research centre. Bita Fayyazi herself today presents the installation to Luciano Benetton.
Kismet (the word means “fate” in Persian) is a group of golden, suspended new-born babies which, as Bita Fayyazi says, “dissociate from the reality in which they find themselves. Loosing their apparent form and solidity, spinning cocoons, contemplating their world as an impregnable castle. They realize their destiny”. Because destiny reserves a day for all of us, each and every one.
Formerly shown at the 51st International Biennale of Venice in 2005, the work is now at Fabrica in the corridor between the neo-Palladian villa and Tadao Ando’s new building: a symbolic passage between the old and the new, past and future. Between the Western world and Oriental culture, which the Benetton Group, and its president in particular, has always observed with great interest.
Artist’s Comment
I have been making sculptures of babies for some 7 years…
Returning from an exhibition in Denmark I had stepped into an airport book shop. Browsing through a book of photography on the Bosnian war, one particular image caught my attention: a tragic black and white picture depicting the burial preparation of a small baby which had been shot dead, the bullet having engraved a black hole through it’s chest.
I don’t unfortunately recall the photographer’s name, but that haunting image has stayed with me ever since. We are surrounded with images and accounts of children being wounded, murdered, killed in wars, abused, used in hard labour,…
When I resumed work at my studio in Tehran, the first thing I started making was essentially my impressions of the baby in that image. It had met it’s fate in a tragic fashion. Fate itself and the way destiny unfolds… what if the infant could somehow catch a glimpse of it’s own impending fate and the world about it?
With Kismet the whole idea started with a proposal I submitted to the selection committee for the 51st International Venice Biennale in 2005.
Kismet means fate and it was first introduced into the English language by a diffident English writer Edward Fitzgerald (1809-83) through his translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat stanza (Book of quatrain verses by Omar Khayyam, 11th century Persian poet), Book by Omar Khayyam
“The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on; nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
The Kismet installation is open to interpretation and can be read from any direction or angle. However, for me, the story is followed from right to left, as in the script of my native tongue, Persian.
“Golden Babies dissociating from the reality in which they find themselves. Loosing their apparent form and solidity, spinning cocoons, contemplating their world as an impregnable castle. They realize their destiny. The source, left behind, is bereft of substance; in pieces, shattered.”
Bita Fayyazi
January 2007
via Bita Fayyazi
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