May You Break Free and Outlast Your Enemy (2023) May You Break Free and Outlast Your Enemy (2023) comprises a sculptural installation of a colossal cracked clay head surrounded by ten
fritillaria imperialis, a flower native to Iran, rendered in black glass and paired with a photographic diptych taken by the artist's father depicting a meadow next to an oil field aflame. The work recalls the entwined histories of oil extraction, botanical excursions, and archeological expeditions. It critiques the disciplines of art history, archaeology and botany which have been used to justify extractive practices such as the expropriation of land, natural resources and cultural belongings as part of the imperialist project. It reflects on the roles of cultural institutions like museums and archives and collection and acquisition processes. This work has been shown at the
National Gallery of Canada in 2023 and the
Art Gallery of Burlington in 2025.
Troubled Garden: Study for Migratory Roots (2022) Planting Displacement (2022) brings together an expansive body of Norouzi's work that includes archival documents, photographs,
cyanotypes, sculptures, and videos, all of which investigate the plant colloquially referred to as
giant hogweed. This project examines the legacies of botanical explorations, when scientific research and agricultural production became entangled in the exploitation of non-Western geographies, shaping cultural attitudes towards the human and non-human “other.” Originating in
Southwest Asia and known in the artist's ancestral homeland of Iran as
Heracleum persicum (Persian hogweed), the plant spread to the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through European colonial interventions, trade routes, and Western interest in acquiring “exotic” species. In recent decades it has been recognized as a noxious weed in the West affecting native flora and fauna, and human beings too, due to its toxic sap.
Troubled Garden: Study for Migratory Roots has been shown at Grantham Foundation for Arts and Environment, the
Art Gallery of Guelph, and received attention from media such as LaPresse, Spirale, esse, among others.
Other Landscapes (2020) Other Landscapes (2020) is multi-part project that stems from Norouzi's long-term research interest in the cross sections of
botany and colonial politics, experiences of immigration and displacement, as well as issues of identity and memory. Taking the form of a
multimedia installation, the project results from a collaboration between Norouzi and eight refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. As a way to get closer to their stories, she focuses on the objects that they brought with them on their journey. The small selection of belongings that they can bring along as they leave their lives behind adds a significant meaning to the status of these objects. Essentially, they embody what a person wanted to retain from their home. This body of work has been exhibited at Esplanade Art and Heritage Center, Plein sud, centre d'exposition en art actuel, and Stewart Hall Gallery, and Warren G. Flowers Art Gallery, Vie des arts,
Tehran, The Apocalypse (2012) Tehran, The Apocalypse (2012) is a documentation of a performance which was filmed in Tehran in 2011, after the government's crackdowns of the
Green Movement protests. The work exists at the intersection of performance and documentary realism. Locating herself as a ‘citizen-artist’, Norouzi performs an act of violence in a public space and creates a moment of extreme tension, as she attempts to challenge gender norms and critique institutionalized forms of political and religious violence in Iran. In the subsequent years, Norouzi performed two other performances in Tehran—
One Hundred Cypresses (2013) and
Flesh Memory (2017)—which the three together creates a trilogy that intends to map the boundaries of the artist's physical and psychological strength. By using her body and its materiality, with the histories and geographies that determine it, this trilogy calls for an active participation of individuals in the process of preserving what they identify with in the era of decay. ==References==