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Hanieh Khatibi

Walking in Water

April 14 – May 19, 2024

Spore Space is excited to present Walking In Water by Los Angeles based artist, Hanieh Khatibi. Khatibi presents a body of work that explores the ephemeral nature of movement and time both in the natural world and within ourselves.

In this body of work, Khatibi finds duality within voids, forces, movements, and shapes. The doubling of process and forms occurred in and through a variety of conditions; the way a body presses and leaves repeated marks on paper, the accumulation of stones that are close to identical, and a hole through a rock that becomes a space holder.

Khatibi’s work is rooted in performance and documentation. The performances often are received as video or photographic images. Here, the impression of the figure can be seen as a drawing on a sheet of paper. Interested in liminality and the subjectivity of water, she takes long walks by the shore, collecting tumbled stones along the way. Through the compression, formation, breakage, and movement of stones followed by the artist's discovery and assemblage, Khatibi's sculptures embody dynamics of flux and impermanence in the ever-shifting coastline of her adopted home.

The installation questions what it means to be in a state of becoming or transformation. What marks are made in this process of metamorphosis? What will stay bound or break apart in duality?

Hanieh Khatibi (b. 1985, Tehran, Iran) is a visual artist and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles. She works across a range of media, including video, performance, sculpture, and drawing, and explores the continuity, resistance, and interrelationships that exist in nature and society through her art. Khatibi's work has been exhibited at venues such as the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Human Resources, ArtCenter DTLA,Track 16, and Schindler House, among others. She holds an MFA in art program from CalArts and an undergraduate degree in graphic design from the Rajaee University of Tehran.

In November 2023, I spent two weeks in Joshua Tree as part of A-Z West Residency.

For my time there, I brought three texts with me. During my first night stay in the desert, I opened each one randomly and wrote them down one after the other after reading them aloud to myself. I became interested in the sudden relationship between them and how the three of them together became one thing. I continued the fortune-telling with three books each night. The poems below are from the first night. The texts are:

هفتاد سنگ قبر. یدالله رویایی

Seventy Tombstones. by Yadollah Royaee
Published 2008, second edition
Page 102

The Flowers of Evil. by Charles Baudelaire

Translated by James McGowan
First published 1993, reissued 2008
Page 325

The Butterfly's Burden. by Mahmoud Darwish

Translated by Fady Joudah
Published 2007
Page 227