Fawn Industrial Complex
By Nay Saysourinho
Samira Abbassy, Dark Snow, collage and acrylic, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
FAWN INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
NAY SAYSOURINHO / FEB 2021 / ISSUE 5
i don’t know how to not be prey
waiting in the tall grass or
in the shadow
i’ve learned not to breathe
when i hear their voices
i’ve learned to look like
a mounted creature behind museum glass my head askew making them think yes this is the
way she looks in her natural habitat
but my habitat is the surround sound
of my death approaching
i lie in wait
in the tall grass of their voices
i’ve learned to look like
two black eyes and skin over bones
stretched like
a drum waiting to be hit
lifelike
representation
of my helplessness
i don’t know how
to read faces i only know that i can’t stop watching but
this is nature
i eat you too.
Nay Saysourinho is a writer, literary critic and visual artist. She is the 2020 Rona Jaffe Fellow at MacDowell and a Berkeley Fellow at Yale. In addition to having received the Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship from One Story Magazine in its inaugural year, she was awarded fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, The Writers Grotto, The Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and Tin House. She has been published in The Funambulist Magazine, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares Blog, and more. She is currently working on a novel and a series of visual fables based on Lao weaving symbology.
Samira Abbassy was born in Ahwaz, Iran and moved to London as a child. After graduating from Canterbury College of Art, she showed her work in London for ten years before moving to New York in 1998. There, she established and co-founded the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and EFA Studios. She currently has a lifetime tenure at EFA Studios. During her thirty year career, her work has been shown internationally in the UK, Europe, the US, and the Middle East. Her work has been acquired for private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, the British Government Art Collection, the Burger Collection, the Donald Rubin collection (Rubin Museum, NY), the Farjam Collection, Dubai, the Devi Foundation, India, the Omid Foundation, Iran, and NYU’s Grey Art Gallery Collection. In 2013, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired The Eternal War Series #2 for their permanent collection, and in 2015, the 12 panel painting was shown alongside pages from the Shah-Nameh manuscripts to which it refers, in the Kevorkian Room, Islamic Dept. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her exhibitions have been reviewed by numerous publications including by Benjamin Genocchio in the New York Times, Ariella Budek in Newsday, Nisa Qasi in the Financial Times, and the Boston Globe.