Born in Lausanne, Vanessa Safavi will have a traveling, almost nomadic childhood. In 2003, she studied at the Cantonal Art School of Lausanne (ECAL) where she obtained her diploma in visual arts in 2007. Artistic residencies punctuated her career to take her from Paris to Cape Town, from Johannesburg to New York , from Peru to Heiligenberg, or even to Rome in 2021. Along with her artistic activities, she will work as a recorder with the State Secretariat for Migration in Bern, fuelling her research on questions of territories, colonisation and migratory flows. In 2018, she resumed studies at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD), obtaining a master’s degree in 2020. From the 2010s, Vanessa Safavi enjoyed critical recognition in Switzerland and abroad. Her works are presented at the Kunsthaus Glarus in Glarus (2011), for a first major solo exhibition, which will be followed by monographic presentations in Altkirch, Paris and Basel (2012), Sao Paulo (2014), Bentheim ( 2016) and in Fribourg (2019). Awarded in 2012 by the Illy Prize, then in 2019, by the Irène Raymond Prize, her work is regularly shown in galleries, in Berlin, Brussels, Athens, London or Zurich.

Vanessa Safavi’s early research is strongly influenced by her own cultural identity, spanning three countries, two continents. For several years, she will explore issues related to population movements, tourism and the notion of exoticism, guided in particular by reading Claude Lévi-Strauss. It will first be the desert (Real Life is Elsewhere, 2011), which she encounters in Africa, which will come to inhabit her exhibitions in the form of sandy expanses filling space. The question of otherness and alienation within the same community is evoked with Les Figures Autonomes (2011), thin metallic sculptures with geometric designs that soar vertically in space like simplified figures. Shortly after, Safavi created an installation made up of taxidermized birds – small parrots, parakeets, canaries – deposited on the ground (Each Color is a Gift for you, 2012). These delicate birds with shimmering colors embody a stereotypical form of exoticism: singing, twirling, colorful. By presenting them lifeless, sad remnants of forced domestication, the artist reveals, with eloquent economy of means, the failure of colonial utopia and its cultural appropriations.
After this phase nourished by a form of societal commitment, Safavi returns to the fundamentals of sculpture and develops an in-depth exploration of materials. She stretches both physical and symbolic possibilities, and easily jumps from one plastic universe to another depending on the story that interests her. In this wake, rubbers, silicone, resin, plastics quickly become essential elements of her work. More particularly, the sensuality of silicone, its texture close to the skin, its mutability properties, its transparency effects, associated with medical, fetishist or even feminine connotations will allow her to develop different series of sculptures. Associated with sand and shells (Interiors, 2013), entwined with a metal bar (So Many Banana Skins in the Pathway (Holding Substitute I), 2016), or imprisoned in a wooden cage (The Witness, 2017), silicone becomes, in her hands, a fabulous storyteller. Guided by the crossed influences of Lygia Clarke and Lynda Benglis, as well as by the joyful exuberances of pop culture, those of Ettore Sotsass or John MCracken, Safavi has developed a singular language, sometimes learned, always full of spirit, infused with geometric abstraction and post-minimalism, and as playful as it is sensual.

Safavi studied at HEAD (MA-Geneva) and ECAL (BA-Lausanne). She has exhibited at the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard in Paris and at FRI-ART Kunsthalle in 2019, Fürstenbergischen Sammlungen Donaueschingen, “Turns and Returned” The Breeder, Athens (2018), “The Cook and the Smoke Detector”, ChertLüdde, Berlin (2017), “Medulla Plaza”, Kunstverein Grafschaft, Bentheim (2016), “Airbags”, MOTINTERNATIONAL, Brussels (2015), “cloud metal cities”, Kunsthalle São Paulo, Sao Paolo (2014), “La Nuit Liquide” , The Breeder, Athens (2014); “Οne Torino“, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2013), Kunsthaus Glarus, “After the Monument Comes the People”, Backwall Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2012), “I Wish Blue could be Water”, CRAC Alsace (2012), “Les Figures Autonomes”, Center Culturel Suisse, Paris (2011). Vanessa Safavi is a recipient of the 2012 Illy Present/Future Prize, the Irene Raymond Prize in 2019 and has exhibited internationally since 2010.

Vanessa Safavi is represented by ChertLuedde, Berlin; The Breeder, Athens and Fabienne Levy, Lausanne

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« Alien Armpit » brings together short texts and images the artist Vanessa Safavi made over a nine years period, between 2013 and 2022. Arranged non-chronologically, images of folded sheets of rubber revolves around a short story, daydreams and poems, as if, in intimate relation, they suggest an encounter rather than the event itself. « Alien Armpit » reveals the accidental and ephemeral nature of things and the observation of their inherent particularities and results from working within a limited field of actions. Safavi moves, collects, thinks about her intimate, vivid reality around her home or while traveling and occasionally, she writes. The book reflects the intimacy of thought in search of an event in constant circulation and fluctuation. Fundamentally experimental« Alien Armpit », her first book, experiences automatic writing and the art of seeing things; bodies, organs, elephants. Between stillness and voice, Safavi breaths. Amused while suffering, she answers questions and survives them.

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