First Monograph on Pouran Jinchi Explores 25-Year Artistic Trajectory

Akkadia Press has published the first monograph on Iranian-American artist Pouran Jinchi, featuring essays by three critics that examine her 25-year career. Shiva Balaghi's essay opens with a description of Jinchi's Brooklyn studio, highlighting her formal experimentations and literary abstractions set against military aesthetics and minimalist grids. Maryam Ekhtiar discusses Jinchi's use of nasta'liq Persian calligraphy, subverting legibility by deconstructing language into diacritical marks and infusing letters with density and motion inspired by swarming ants and centrifugal forces. Ben Eastham's essay avoids a cultural lens, instead drawing literary allusions to Vladimir Nabokov and Ezra Pound and concrete poetry to explore the seeing, decoding, and sounding out of language. All three essays converge on Jinchi's deconstruction of Sadegh Hedayat's banned novella The Blind Owl, unifying the book's narrative. Eastham references Virginia Woolf and Hélène Cixous, stating that Jinchi deconstructs the language of power by sensualizing it, exposing and defusing embedded violence. The 2019 publication is available for $59.42.