LANGUAGE OF THE BIRDS
Yassi Mazandi’s birds take flight.
Installation photo, Yassi Mazandi, Language of The Birds, 2021, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Yassi Mazandi, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA
Persian Farid al-Din 'Attar wrote Conference of the Birds aka Language of the Birds in the twelfth-century. This beautiful parable speaks of a mythical quest of one hundred birds in search of a ruler (known as the Simurgh). They seek a spiritual path to God and to their higher selves. Along the way many of them perish. The remaining thirty come to understand that they are in fact the Simurgh.
Inspired by this poem artist Yassi Mazandi created a kinetic sculptural work Language of The Birds currently installed at the Resnick Pavillion at LACMA in Los Angeles. Her birds are featherless bronze bones. Dead things in flight. We are witnessing the loss of many of our avian friends and the dangerous migration due to climate change that is being undertaken by humans and birds alike. Mazandi is asking us to take a moment and think about our future, both spiritually and physically.
Installation photo, Yassi Mazandi, Language of The Birds, 2021, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Yassi Mazandi, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA
“The birds discover the simorgh
The thirty birds read through the fateful page
And there discovered, stage by detailed stage,
Their lives, their actions, set out one by one—
All that their souls had ever been or done”