Leili Arai Tavallaei

Website: latavallaei.com
Email: latavallaei@gmail.com
Instagram: @at_leili

Artist’s Statement

These to-scale gift boxes and personal effects were collected across the early 2000s. Including both Iranian and Japanese-specific belongings, these represent some of the many drawers full of gifts given to the artist’s family. The Nokia phone was gifted to the artist's mother while she was in utero. It’s the first cellphone her family owned and it contains voicemails to this day. Many of the gift boxes contained gold jewelry from overseas featuring farvahar amulets, persian coins, and evil eyes. 

This print was completed during Tavallaei’s 2022 Islam & Print Fellowship in Baltimore, Maryland.

Artist’s Statement

Gol e Gorbe is an evolution of Tavallaei's 2021-22 project, Gol گل, which examined the paradoxical relationship between preserving memory, its disintegration, and its transformation across the mind, print media, and web-based platforms. Gol e Gorbe features vignettes of the artist's childhood, inner monologue, and amorphous memories. Multiple small screens are arranged in a bouquet, sprouting from a shelf with reclaimed brass hardware. In one of the vignettes, we focus on an image of the artist with her father in the first home he owned.