Commonwealth & Council presents PTL (Part Time Lover) + FTL (Full Time Lover), companion exhibitions of works by Shagha Ariannia & Danielle Dean at CW&C and Co/Lab.

PTL & FTL are diasporic love affairs of transnational political actors. In between social and geographic locales of personal and collective desires, Shagha Ariannia & Danielle Dean script narratives of difference that stage modes of multiplicity and plurality of meaning.

Shagha Ariannia composes love letters between Iran, Israel, Iraq and U.S.A. arranged from national anthems in Farsi, Hebrew, Arabic and English. These romantic courtships in between the nations with their real time relationship statuses shifting from close ties to hostility to no diplomatic relations emphasize the complexity of their continuous love affairs.

Scripted from rhetoric of advertising, reportage, political speech and soap opera tropes, Danielle Dean stages a theater of refusal where actors decipher fixed ideological positions perpetuated by the commercial world and traverse into romantic interludes as politicized bodies of race, gender and class articulations of difference.

Shagha Ariannia (b. 1984, Iran) arrived to the United States in September 2001.  Ariannia received her BFA from the University of California, Irvine and MFA from the Photography and Media program at CalArts.

Danielle Dean (b. 1982, Alabama, U.S.A.) grew up in a suburb of London. Dean received her BFA from Central St Martins School  of Art, London and MFA from CalArts. She recently completed her  esidency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.