Leila Zelli, Birdsong , 2019, animated video, color, 12 min, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
- Exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' Arts du Tout-Monde
- Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts - Press release
Although she is based in Montreal, Leila Zelli remains attached to Teheran, the city where she was born. Her aim is to demonstrate the resilience that is part and parcel of everyday life in the area politically known as the "Middle East", and to question the way we look at this region. All the images in this videogram come from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' collection of Persian ceramics, which the artist studied as part of her Empreintes 2019 residency organized by the Museum in collaboration with the Conseil des arts de Montréal. She juxtaposes the birds depicted on these ceramics with a selection of phrases preceded by ‘#Iran’, posted between June and September 2019 on Twitter (which literally means "chirping", hence its bird logo). By focusing on different aspects of Iranian realities, notably the courage shown by women today, the artist questions the identity of Iran as imagined in popular thought
excerpt from the video
De nouvelles acquisitions dans les musées, Leila Zelli : Le chant des oiseaux (2019), La vie des arts, Number 257– Winter, Montreal, p. 18.