Rainbow - Nazanin Fakoor

Nazanin Fakoor sought for the creation of Rainbow inspiration in 'The Conference of the Birds', a literary masterpiece by the Persian mystic poet Farid ud-Din Attar. In Attar’s story, thousands of birds search for Simorgh, the mythical bird that symbolizes the truth. After many hardships on their journey, only 30 birds reach the end of their quest. Only then do they realize that they themselves are the Si (thirty) morgh (birds).

This beautiful poetry provides the basis for the libretto. The music of Rainbow is written by the Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi for the Swara Ensemble. The immersive installation – literally – reflects our differences and multiple identities. In this way, Fakoor reflects on the myth of a clear-cut national identity and the celebration of difference.

Rainbow is a project that questions identity and its multiple facets. Comparable to rainbows, formed by the reflection and dispersion of sunlight, we all are the result of an infinity of reflections of the encounters that accumulate throughout history. Our identity is plural, but we are constantly confronted with a simplifying categorization.

Nazanin Fakoor is a Brussels based visual and performance artist. She was born in Teheran and grew up in Germany, where she studied theatre arts at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. She continued her education at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and subsequently studied scenography at the La Cambre School of Visual Arts in Brussels. Her studies ultimately led her to the border between theatre and the visual arts.

In 2004 she met the American avant-garde director Robert Wilson, who introduced her to his artistic laboratory in New York, where they worked in a similarly integrated manner: photography, performance, video, choreography, sound and light influence one another, as partial fragments of modern (visual) art. Her visual installations and performances are utopian approaches to reality, which are also located at the boundary between the recognizable and estranging, between truth and illusion.