Maryam Taghavi: Estranged Letters

I met Maryam Taghavi through a mutual friend in Chicago. We happened to be neighbors, living in Chicago’s Hyde Park, and we quickly became good friends. We spent a lot of time walking around Lake Michigan talking about our work and struggle as independent artists. Maryam had just been invited by curator Bana Kattan to exhibit her first major solo show at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a rare and auspicious opportunity. I started to think that Maryam, in this particular moment in her life, would be a brilliant subject for a documentary film intimately following her creative process.

Artists are often celebrated at the completion of their work, but what would it mean to show an artist contemplating, searching, and grappling with their creative process? As a filmmaker I believe that being in community with visual artists offers a rare opportunity to bear witness to their practice and their personal life journey, and being invited to have access to that process with a camera is really the most generous gift on the part of any artist. To be vulnerable and open in the middle of a most intimate moment, before the work is finished, before its ever shown in a museum, takes a particular level of grit and courage and Maryam embraced it.

Maryam was born in Tehran and lived and worked in Chicago for more than a decade, until last year, unexpectedly, her immigration status was revoked and she suddenly found herself unable to return home to the United States. Interrogating her positionality as an Iranian living in the diaspora, Maryam’s practice makes poetry out of the liminal space between the written word and the illegible, between distance and belonging and in her most recent work, between the horizon and its illusive vanishing point. In her newfound exile, Maryam continues to make work that grapples with the immutability of distance.

In 2023 Maryam created a large scale sculpture using Persian calligraphy and tapping into ideas from the Islamic occult. Her finished piece “Spell for Safe Passage” was commissioned by the city of Chicago and installed at Chicago O’Hare international airport last year. The mixed media installation uses calligraphic Farsi script to resemble the form of a ship – in a creative appropriation of an ancient talisman believed to have the power of protection, derived from the tale of the Seven Sleepers, a popular story in Islamic mythology. Though Maryam herself currently can’t travel through an American airport, in what feels like an act of poetic justice, her magical sculpture, still hangs at O’Hare airport and will remain there permanently, offering a whisper of protection to foreign visitors and immigrants alike who pass by its hallowed vitrine in the international arrivals terminal.