Rex Delafkaran – SAIC Graduate Exhibition 2025

SAIC SHOWS 2025 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2025 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Rex Delafkaran

Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Sculpture

Graduate Exhibition One

rexdelafkaran.com

Rex Delafkaran is an interdisciplinary artist and dancer from California, based in Chicago. Tied up in her sculptures is a dedication to concepts of futility and the abject, and the occasional awkwardness of sincerity and tenderness. Through her queer, Iranian, American, and feminist aesthetic lineage and history she investigates what materials we have at our disposal to make meaning, and where we mythologize utility and identity. Using movement and objects she plays with the failure and poetry among bodies, objects, and language.

Delafkaran has exhibited and staged performances at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Panoply Performance Lab, Brooklyn, NY; Platform Art Fair, Athens, Greece; Satellite Art Fair, Miami, FL; Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and the Textile Museum, Washington, DC; among others. She is a recent recipient of a NARS Foundation International Artist Residency Fellowship and a Warhol Foundation Wherewithal Research Grant. Delafkaran holds a degree in Ceramics and Performance Art from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a forthcoming Masters in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Rex Delafkaran - Zoorkhaneh-man

Zoorkhaneh-man, 2024, performance, 30 mins

Performance documentation from original performance of "Zoorkhaneh-man"

Rex Delafkaran - Aerobic

Aerobic, 2024, latex, vibrators, 27 x 8 x 8 in.

Here is a bit about my practice:

Tied up in my sculptures is a dedication to concepts of futility and the abject, and the occasional awkwardness of sincerity and tenderness. I am interested in what materials we have at our disposal to make meaning, and where we mythologize utility and identity.

My practice is grounded in language, relationships between bodies and functional objects, and what our labor means in late-stage capitalism. I question these cultural systems through my queer, Iranian, American, and feminist aesthetic lineage and history. While working across disciplines I play with and combine materials with calculation in order to exercise the hybrid objects’ gestalt meanings.

What happens when we make hard edges where there are none? Or when we refuse singularity in form, identity, and objecthood? Does reinventing new frameworks for a practice reassert the harmful social, political, and economic structures in which we already live? These are questions alive in the making of my work.

Moving within additional frameworks of sensitivity, anti-productivity and humor, I am translating ideas predominantly through interdisciplinary sculpture, ceramics, and live performance. When deployed in space the objects perform aliveness, in between active and static.

I think about the body as a tool and through the use of my own, both as a performer and a maker, I am wading through personal, cultural minutiae to make sense of where and how we position ourselves. The resulting artworks tie materials to history or location, production to labor and capital, and performance to embodiment.