Paulina Archambault

Green Hair

2023

Acrylic paint on canvas Signed on the back Zahra ZEINALI was born in 1975 in Tehran, Iran. From 2001 to 2004, she studied Fine arts at the Art and Architecture University in Tehran. At the same time, she taught visual arts to children during 15 years. Passionate about photography, she trained in photography in 2007 at the House of Photography in Tehran. In 2012, she moved to France. Confronted with her new life, her vision of the world changed. Since 2020, she has resumed training in photography at the EFET School in Paris. Zahra ZEINALI The Doll’s House “What can a true artistic temperament aspire to after a youth spent in Iran today? To flee the hassles, prejudices, restrictions, to open wide a window of freedom rich in potentialities that were believed for a long time inaccessible. Zahra Zeinali became a visual arts teacher for fifteen years. Her pupils are 6 to 12 years old. Drawing, sculpture, painting, model design, she taught them a great diversity of techniques, but above all to think and design freely by themselves, in an atmosphere of joyful creative disorder which, surprisingly, is tolerated by a careful hierarchy. Then she studied four years at the University of Art and Architecture in Tehran. When she arrived in France, after a brief abstract period inspired by the rhythms of nature, it was at the time of the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks, which marked her deeply, to the point of lastingly darkening the ideal of emancipation and autonomy that she had projected on her stay in Paris. "There is no paradise on earth" she concluded with a melancholy smile. An old doll, bought for 1 euro in a storage room, triggers a click in her. The bitter imprint left by the Iranian confinement, the memory of her fifteen years of teaching visual arts to children, the loneliness of her Parisian exile, all this sentimental nebula found a plastic metaphor in the image of the doll. This is what these delicate earthenware faces evoke, often abused, abandoned, the childish innocence of their ingenuous gazes, a sort of strange absence from the world of the living, as if their attenuated life took place behind the mystery of a theater curtain...

Acrylic paint on canvas Signed on the back