A Rereading of Farideh Lashaee's Paintings in Light of Merleau-Ponty's Ideas

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the twentieth century phenomenologist, believed that the body's functionality in sensual perception is a distinguished notion. From 1980s, a critical movement took form which made some changes in art works production in order to actualize a chiasm between the audience with an art work through senses. Farideh Lashaee, as one of the contemporary artists, in her recent works, has made use of videos to make rooms for hidden narrations. This article analyzes her Gone down the rabbit hole work in Tehran Contemporary Arts Museum _ the curtain painted from Iran's map with an art video of rabbits' leap into the map. The present article explains Merleau-Ponty's sensual perception through a descriptive-phenomenological approach. Afterwards, reliant on Merleau-Ponty's ideas, it intends to answer some questions analytically. What would be the roles of body and embodiment in perceiving the world from the painter's standpoint? How the euphony between video and painting would be actualized in the mentioned work? What would be the role of audience's body (subject) in her perception in such a work? Subject's confrontation with the hinted work is making a multi-sensual relations, how does the audiences' sensual perception  will come true? As a result, regarding the phenomenological approach, the main cocern rests on the painter as an embodied subject encountering the world while the body and sensation would be parts of her experience. Merleau-Ponty envisions painting as the representation of sensual experience. The euphony of the work is the outcome of the co-penentration of the sensual characteristics in Merleau-Ponty's viewpoint. The audience's chiasm with Lashaee's work is an embodied interaction. With regards to Geshtalt in Merleau-Ponty's perspective, the audience's sensual perception, takes shape because of the unity of sensations. Eventually, in Lashaee's work, the subject's integration with her body gives rise to the sensual perception of the world.