Between Black and White | 2013
9-15 December | Mohtasham Gallery | Urmia/Iran
The future belongs to ghosts.
— Jacques Derida
Reproductive mediums and performance are defined structurally by the layered temporality they present: they viscerally refer to past and prior acts that are perceived in the present in such a way as to bring the past into the present, to metaphorically bring the dead back to life, and thus to suspend the viewer or audience between history and the immediate. It is because of this quality that photography and video, like performance, has been seen from its inception to have a kind of magical power, if not to transcend death then to constantly remind us, as a memento mori, of the inexorable passage of time.
— Retrieved from the haunted exhibition catalogue – Guggenheim Museum
How to perform absence by presence? How does he find his absence in my presence? The tension to darkness which is bright as daylight, though. This video performance centered on the concept of mental conflict between existence and nothingness, life and death, presence and absence, past and present. The artist performs a suffer of an absence in an elusive attempt to return a lost soul. Here the return might be more painful than lost itself, though if really the moment of returning the soul to the body, is accompanied by the moment of slight pain in the chest while sneezing?
