Masoumeh Mozafari is an artist whose social and political issues of contemporary Iranian society play a prominent role in her works. Her realism exhibits scenes from everyday life featuring people with silent, neutral, and indifferent faces. Paying attention to the mundane, as well as the instability and threat that is felt by people in Masoumeh's works, creates a utopian world that is constantly vacillating between stagnation and collapse.
We often assume that everyday life is a familiar and simple concept to grasp even though this is not the case.
The familiar can not necessarily be easily recognized and understood.
Masoumeh questions the obvious and by recording and displaying the familiar, pictures a world where even trivial things become problematic. Ordinary time, bewildered people, overturned tables, read newspapers, hidden rooms and unseen corners, hallways, and flying spoons, all point to the unstoppable forces that lurk in the shadows of everyday life.
Philosophical anthropology considers everyday life as the main act of meaning production. What is also called the "life of the world" is the space where individual and social abilities, forces, desires, and deficiencies are created and represented. It is in such space that we as humans get to know and understand society, the other, and ourselves.
If we look at the representation of daily life from this point of view we can see how it can be a form of expressing critical theory in art and can be used to address and understand social situations and important currents in cultural and political developments of the day.
Everyday life sociologists believe that the art of ordinary things is an instance of critical art theory and by developing a more complete understanding of concepts such as class consciousness, urban life experience, loneliness, and alienation, can ultimately make society more humane.
Masoumeh Mozafari's recent works can be seen as a deep reflection and a thorough study of the nature of Iranian daily life in a critical way and an effort to answer questions such as What is our situation? And how is the quality of our life?
These works are a representation of the world of our daily life and an attempt to record the "ordinary". The artist expresses her views on the social and environmental conditions in which she lives through her paintings, and that's how she puts forth "astonishment" and "perplexity" in front of audiences.
Private life and domestic spaces can be seen in most of Masoumeh's works. The silence and stasis that sometimes can be disturbing, objects whose familiar order is deranged, faces that are immersed in their own world or are staring at the empty space full of unsaid words, imply the image of an unknown world with unhappy and silent inhabitants.
The utopian nature of Masoumeh's works is rooted in her continuous exploration towards understanding the meaning and apprehending the components and elements of everyday life. A situation where people have disappeared from hints of wide-ranging, complex, and contradictory interpretations through everyday objects such as newspapers left on the tables and clothes whose owners have vanished.
Loneliness and alienation are among other concepts that flow in the works of this artist. Her works pay close attention to the quality of social relations and the alienated life of individual. Humans seem to be deprived of living, happiness, and being with each other and express their painful deprivations with their indecisiveness.
In Masoumeh Mozafari's works, the world represents the painful toll of internalized alienation that citizens experience in a charged political atmosphere and polarized society. Naturally, Human beings are social and communally active creatures, but in these works, it seems that they are suffering from loneliness, dread, and grueling oppression.
The silent heroes of Masoumeh's stories, the inhabitants of this forgotten land, have a clear message about Our common experience of isolation and the failure to influence our own life, a life that we could not own.