By Samuel Schwindt
I clichély joke every Chicago “fools spring” that the perpetually pending warmth makes me a houseplant desperate for a little sunlight (to restore my sanity). I tossed this joke to Laleh Motlagh for the first time meeting her, unbeknownst to her prolific plant practice. Her solo exhibition at Chicago Art Department, Cultivating Dispersal, curated by Cecilia González Godino, arrived quickly after our first encounter.
The histories Motlagh contours are intricate and delicate. In her searching and longing for a plummeted past, her artworks become counter-monuments: antithetical structures of subversion, unpredictably rooted in her body and flora-heirlooms (house plants and weeds). I wanted to know from Motlagh, herself: how do the tendrils of our consciousnesses, collective or personal, invade place, time, and objects? And how do our memories of memories supplant?
In a homecoming to a mutated space, Untitled, Motlagh precariously filmed herself where her family home in Iran once stood (it was demolished by developers). In the sequel piece The Loss across the room, she wears the same all-white garment and scarf, now kneeling in her Chicago backyard. The scarf plays a major role: she says it ties back to the patriarchal society she grew up in, filtered through the layered oppressions against women in Iran. The video pair acts as a feedback loop.
Samuel Schwindt: What history could be there still if the house was plundered for development? What remains?
Laleh Motlagh: This house was where I was born and raised. That same year that my parents moved there, and I was born there, my father had planted three trees in front of the house. When I went back in December of 2024, I went and found the neighborhood, found the house, and one of the trees was still there, right? But the house isn’t.
It’s all that memory, that time that’s embedded in that tree, standing up. I decided to stand in the video. The tree also has this form of standing.
This was very controversial because there are so many political issues in Iran now. There’s so much surveillance, especially regarding women. People are afraid of cameras.
Even [while I was] shooting this, the neighbor came out and started giving me a really hard time.
SS: I’m thinking a lot about the word “embodiment” with your work. The tree is still absorbing all the oxygen, the environmental factors of the surroundings as it grows and changes. You did that with your past in place and self, politically with Iran and inhabiting that history within your body.
LM: It’s migration. There’s always the question of where home is, right? And I feel like these videos really create this dialogue back and forth. And continue to wrestle with this idea of there it is. Is it there? Is it somewhere between?
Contained in wood-plank frames and dangling from the ceiling, plant detritus swirls and shrugs. They become a simulacrum of plant boxes. The debris is from her backyard, and rather than discarding, she replaces weeding with harvesting and harnessing.
SS: Tell more about how you think conceptually about framing and its interaction with the plants?
LM: It’s an ephemeral structure, but the frame is always going to be there. I don’t modify. I don’t transform, I don’t change it in any form or any shape. It stays as is, and then I bring it to the studio, I hang it — it dries.
And then when I install it, pieces fall off. It’s very much like a letting go process, right? Even though structures come in, like with the house being demolished and rebuilt.
SS: Yes. Even if you pull up all the weeds in your backyard, they do always come back. That root structure is still there. While this is a fleeting gesture, it doesn’t have pessimism in it. These will come back in that space. Just as you returned to this space (gesturing to the video of Motlagh in Iran), it becomes a reminder of time again.
LM: And resilient. I think of this with women in Iran. How resistant and resilient they are, and how they continue to tackle and resist against oppression. They don’t get stopped.
There isn’t a stopgap. It’s like there’s a continuous pushing. In the fall of 2022, the Woman Life Freedom Movement, nationwide protests took place in Iran, which was against women’s compulsory hijabs. It still continues.
Even though with all the resistance, with all the oppressions, with all the surveillance and arrests, and execution of women in Iran or the Middle East, they really are incredibly resilient. And I sometimes find it hard to have that sort of resilience here.
A lot of times, I look at these entanglements, how they are structured, and how they hold themselves. And how they have this life cycle. That they die out and come back out, die out, and come back out every year after year. It just reminds me very much of that movement.
In spring 2022, as the war in Eastern Europe began and as the world felt like it was unraveling, Motlagh turned to her potted plants in her house and studio. She drew them as a quiet form of connection, tracing their contained, melancholy presence. In the fall of 2024, she returned to the same drawings, layering gray over black.
In the back corner is Quiet Chaos (lines), a cartographic tracing on paper is then secured sacredly in a frame. The drawing depicts two jade plants (one brought by her father when he immigrated, the other gifted to her years later in Chicago).
LM: Again, it’s that displacement, that migration. Being in one pot and figuring out ways of a home, of survival. Can these two cultures, my two cultures, reside next to one another? What does that space feel like for me?
SS: It’s a gesture of archiving, too. But the drawings hammer in that when we remember things, we don’t remember the actual event. We have the memory of the memory of it. And there are constantly disguising layers.
But you’re not upset with that either. You’re finding beauty in that process and processing it.
LM: It’s very internal, but I am processing it.
—
Motlagh and I took a brief break from recording and meandered to a coffee shop down the street. While waiting for our order, she showed me an image of her as a child in Iran, beside a seemingly giant planter box in her living room, larger than her. The distortion in perspective stuck with me, from the small to the large: how things live in people’s minds, then the actual object or experience. I began recording again when we returned to Chicago Art Department.
SS: On our walk, you mentioned that your practice with plants is the personal made into the global.
LM: They go across cultures, religions, and time, right? And again, it’s that kind of leveling of the playing field that they create for us and let us be in there. As I was saying earlier, plants teach us about ourselves if we have the patience to observe and learn from them, and not be so human-centric, and see other beings in our surroundings.
You can see more of Laleh Motlagh’s work on her website or Instagram.
