Roksana Pirouzmand at OXY ARTS and JOAN

Roksana Pirouzmand, Land (installation view) (2026). Ceramic, steel, contact mic, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and OXY ARTS. Photo: Gina Clyne.

Roksana Pirouzmand’s solo show, everything was once something else, recently on view at OXY ARTS, invited visitors to step onto a thin metal platform that held a trio of ceramic sculptural installations of figures or body parts, each mounted on tall stilts of thick, flexible wire. A sign near the platform cautioned that the floor was intentionally uneven, and sure enough, it buckled and snapped under me as I moved slowly across it. The shock waves of my steps translated into movement in the sculptures, a direct cause-and-effect that felt simultaneously horrifying and empowering. Wave (2026), comprising two clusters of wire topped with hands, resembled cattails bent towards one another by the wind; as I walked, the hands bobbed endlessly and smacked into each other with a clang. Heads crashed in Land (2026), transforming what may have looked like a tender nuzzle in moments of stasis into a violent grinding. Not long into the run of the show, these repeated corrosive touches had taken their toll, visible in amputated fingers, ceramic dust, and worn-down noses. These were sculptures meant to bend and break, and to implicate viewers in their demise.

The show at OXY, which also included several smaller sculptures and wall-mounted clay reliefs, constituted one half of a two-venue exhibition that continued at JOAN, marking Pirouzmand’s most ambitious presentation to date. Across both spaces, the artist commits to clay, casting aside any hint of preciousness and instead iterating, experimenting, and testing its limits as a material. In both form and content, Pirouzmand’s work invokes the experience of exile—one the artist, who relocated to Los Angeles from Iran just over a decade ago, knows firsthand. Exile wears away sense memories—the smells, textures, tastes, and sounds archived in the body over years of living in a place one calls home—that give way incrementally as the body acquires the grammar of another country and a foreign culture. “Home” persists as a diminishing trace; what accrues is a specific grief, an alienation not only from somewhere you can no longer reach, but from the self that belonged there.

Roksana Pirouzmand, Wave (installation view) (2026). Ceramic, steel, contact mic, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and OXY ARTS. Photo: Sylvain Tron.

Diasporic experiences are almost always underscored by longing, but to be a part of the Iranian diaspora today is to have the dull heartache of distance compounded by a sense of helplessness in the face of devastating American military action. Pirouzmand’s 2022 series I was praying at home while you were dying on the streets—ceramic wall works featuring drawn figures praying and meditating, tethered to one another and the earth by their hair—thematized these issues in response to her experience witnessing “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests from afar. In a short video produced for Frieze the following year, the artist’s exasperation is evident as she laments being “exposed to all this trauma” while unable to do much about it.¹ Her latest work builds on the frustration of being a digital bystander—a condition many of us, exiled or not, can relate to—while also asking us, in ways subtle and profound, to bear witness to our own complicity in violence and its terrible wake.

I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but the rumblings generated by the sculptures on the heaving platform at OXY were linked, in real time, to works on view at JOAN. There, stacks of disembodied hands and floating bodies echoing forms at OXY were pushed to even greater visceral intensity, surreality, and poetic resonance. Near the entrance at JOAN was a figure on the floor with no head or torso, aptly titled kneeling, sinking (2025). Cut off at the hip, the sculpture’s bowels—or perhaps its womb—had been replaced by a plate of steel inset into the pelvis and etched with a haunting drawing: a child lying on the back of an adult who appears to be sinking downward, one leg already subsumed. The steel plate was slicked with a pool of water rippling from energy transmitted by a “sound exciter,” a tiny transducer that converts audio signals—in this case the crackling metallic sounds of the platform at OXY—into vibration. The effects of my steps, and those of every other visitor, traveled much farther than I had known, entangling each of us in slow damage staged miles away.

Roksana Pirouzmand, kneeling, sinking (2025). Ceramic, steel, patina, and sound exciter, 20 x 8 x 12.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN. Photo: Evan Walsh.

Sonic vibrations recorded at OXY, ranging from gentle to aggressive, caused artworks at JOAN to react and shape-shift. Slabs of ceramic set on steel shelves shook vigorously, eventually cracking into pieces that resembled drought-stricken desert landscapes. Three pairs of chairs invited visitors to sit and feel the pulses that were agitating clay and water on the seats opposite. The visitor-driven movement that had set clay in motion at OXY was here transformed into an alchemical kineticism, allowing the viewer to watch and sense rather than participate. That distancing from action and responsibility—into a mode of subtle but palpable voyeurism—became more acute during the second half of the show’s run at JOAN, when the show at OXY had closed, and no further vibration was transmitted to the exciters. Visitors then arrived to a kind of aftermath, with dismembered fingers and a fine dusting of clay on the floor. The only work still in motion was spring (2025–2026), a cracked, hollow human body made of clay, lying on a steel box with water burbling through the figure’s palms and face, like an embalming without end.

The subtitle of the JOAN presentation—the land was the sea, the sea was the land—also invokes the destabilization of displacement and the feeling of psychic drift familiar to many who live in diaspora. The exhibition’s own structure performs this drift: Divided across two venues, connected only—and just temporarily—by transmitted vibration, it offers no vantage point from which the whole can be seen at once. Like photos sent over spotty Wi-Fi, offering evidence of horror or reassuring signs of survival, the evidence of horror or reassuring signs of survival, the view comes in fragments: an image here, a sensation there, the real and the surreal blurring together in physical space and in the space of dreams and nightmares. Bits of violence assimilate into minds and bodies, threatening to break open vessels always already riven in two.

Roksana Pirouzmand, everything was once something else (the land was the sea, the sea was the land) (installation view) (2026). Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN. Photo: Evan Walsh.

About the author

Andrea Gyorody is a curator, art historian, and critic. Recent projects include solo exhibitions of Jeni Spota C., Karl Haendel, Cameron Harvey, Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson, and Isabel Yellin. She is co-curator of Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature (The Broad, 2024–25); Forms Larger and Bolder: Eva Hesse Drawings (2019–22); and award-winning Afterlives of the Black Atlantic (Allen Memorial Art Museum, 2019–20).

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