Sabina Khorramdel's practice

TJ  •  Issue 02  •  Aïda Àdilbek

Sabina Khorramdel is an artist based between Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and New York,
USA, co-founder of Ruyò Journal, a daughter, a sister, a friend — bold, funny, outgoing, spiritual. She was keen on painting and drawing as a teenager before leaving to study in the US for her BA in Film and Media at Purchase College, SUNY, where she primarily focused on sound art. Like many young people whose adult life started as immigrants, she took many turns before going into the arts again. While going through some of her notes on her artistic practice — which, in her words, is a reflection of her personal life and her mind and body experiences — I was drawn towards the following ideas that I believe may describe her works best:

S.K: “What do I feel? What could bring solace? What does the world need?”

Sabina’s personal life, which was full of turmoil, explains her desire to find ground, to decipher her own emotions, and oftentimes she used a paintbrush as a tool of emotional outlet. Her works, direct images of her senses, are full of shapeless blobs and lines circling and angling at each other, boxed in and repressed by limits. Many of them reminded me of intestines, confined by the borders of the paper — the body — or the limits Sabina set herself: the mind.  Although seemingly expressive and abstract, her strokes look very controlled, thoroughly navigated along the paper — at times too thin, and more often utterly clean. Just like in the quote above, her search for herself and her true colors was always followed by a juxtaposition of her own and the world’s needs, which seemed to be on a path to liberate her hand and the brush, respectively.

S.K: “I love to spoil the closest ones. Sometimes I wish I had someone like me in my life, but then I remember I do — it's me.”

She had a thorough ritual before going into painting in order to never let the negative slip through her onto the paper. Therefore, works that were meant to be a positive emotional outflow and stream of consciousness were also a seal over those feelings she deemed dark. As with many female artists, her perception of her practice was flawed by doubt and hesitancy — to fully switch and be chaotically free is oftentimes an unattainable luxury for us. These complexities are noticeable in her self-portraits, which were usually made in ink, where extra-thin lines formed semi-transparent features of herself. Layered, intertwined lines like a web of threads form her face, with big eyes usually succumbing to the background filled with flowers, not differentiating her from the space she is in. These weightless forms are her delicate and tender reminder of who she is.

S.K: “I think of myself as a complex woman, I can be contradictory. Thus, my emotions are written on my face.”