Collaboration

Ghada Amer first met Reza Farkhondeh in 1988 at the Villa Arson (Nice, France) where they both were art students. At the time, they shared a studio which allowed them to work side by side, watch and informally critique each other’s work. Ghada Amer worked on her painting while Reza Farkhondeh focused on video production. This coincidental set-up continued for years to come.

When Amer moved to Paris in 1990 to do her graduate work at the Institute des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques, the very selective Parisian graduate level art training institute, Farkhondeh joined her in 1992 to do his own graduate work. They continued to share a studio and to work side by side, just as they had done at the Villa Arson.

The two artists continued working side by side at the Hôpital Ephémère in 1993-1995. This was an experimental program located in the vacant site of the Bretonneau hospital in Paris that was temporarily renovated and served as an ephemeral studio space for promising young artists. In their shared studio space at the Hôpital Ephémère, Ghada Amer continued to hone her painting practice, while Reza Farkhondeh, after completing some experimental video art projects, began to paint alongside her.

In 1995, Both Amer and Farkhondeh moved to the United States, first to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where Ghada Amer had secured a one-semester art residency, then to New York City, determined to make it as artists in the Big Apple. While in North Carolina and later in New York City, the two artists once again shared a studio and continued to work side by side, just as they had been doing since the late 1980s.

As they struggled to make their artistic debut, Ghada Amer encouraged Reza Farkhondeh to pursue his love of performance art and to enroll at CalArts in Los Angeles. After one year there, Farkhondeh fell into a clinical depression that forced him out of school and back to New York City.  In their shared Harlem studio, Ghada Amer took care of him and nursed him back to health.

While he struggled to emerge from this somber period of his life, Reza Farkhondeh blamed his artistic practice for his illness and vowed to never engage in an activity that allegedly made him ill. Little did he know that he would return to art in unsuspected, novel ways.

For both artists, Farkhondeh’s illness marked the beginning of a new, accidental, and long lasting form of artistic collaboration, a veritable turning point in their practice.