Zoom In | 2010

Found Aesthetic Series

Atopia | Oslo/Norway

This piece is emerging unknown landscapes from my first significant encounter with a different culture and environment. In this project, while I am traveling to different cities, I am trying to find and evaluate found objects, focusing on material aesthetics, the relation of objects to space, and specific details. By doing so, I am investigating my own identity in that city; this is what I see in the different layers of that society. This is my subconscious sight in that area which comes from my cultural background. These series of works consist of experimental videos, photographs, and sounds I have been collecting from different parts of each city.

Duration: 00’05’58 min. (Loop)

Sound: Distorted from video and GRIMAUD Bach-Prelude in C major

Every city is a particular place, but it has cinematic connections to all the other great cities of the world, their projections traversing time and space. As The Naked City, a 1948 noir, opens with a panning shot over the city where I live, it seems to me that movies invent views as well as plots, contrary to what is believed to be a camera’s power to strip the object in its eye, making that what is hidden visible—that is why cameras have been banished from some places. Exteriority of locations in film lends sociability to the production of private spectacle. In Iran, where public representation of private life is tightly legislated, film and video are developing in the opposite directions—film directors, who are under greater control, tend to situate private dramas in public spaces, especially where female characters are involved, in order to reconcile fictional reality of privacy and its public representation in film in compliance with the codes of representation. Video art production, on the contrary, may not be subject to such codified restrictions—these regulations would only factor in public exhibition. Video makers address public and social issues in private settings and further interiorize them through personal and intimate approaches. However, those artists who work in the public space despite prohibitions play important societal roles, inserting their personal point of view into the public sphere, and, via this insertion, potentially modifying the codes of public life and its representation. A woman with a video camera—all the artists in this program happen to be female, asserting the feminine position in the public sphere—can turn its surveiling insight at the powers that be. The artists take to the streets of Tehran, and show us their city as they live it. This selection of video art, documentary film, and performance documentation conveys their points of view.

Yet that which is not known cannot be shown or seen. Artists construct their imagery out of the pile of fragments and loops of information, choosing and recombining them; as we viewers add our own takes and reimagine these representations. Therefore, “Tehran” in film and video is a multifaceted place, both outer and inner, past and present. Films by Kamran Shirdel—Women’s Prison(1965); The Women’s Quarter (1965-1980); and Tehran is the Capital of Iran (1966-1980)—shall provide a cinematic point of entry into this program, resonating historically and stylistically with current video production. His critique of social ills—poverty, illiteracy, servitude, prostitution—in the pre-revolutionary films has been recast after the Islamic revolution, adding a layer of political schisms to the films’ already fractured verité stylistics. (The Women’s Quarter was banned during its shooting by the Shah’s regime, and finished soon after the revolution in 1980, with insertion of photographs by Kaveh Golestan that were taken a decade after the film was shot.)  Such arc of pertinence (and permissibility) of representation in relation to changing social and political climate sets the historical precedent for socially engaged artists working in Iran today. This program comprised of works of the past half-a-decade by Simin Keramati, Shirin Mozaffari, Neda Razavipour (with Rambod Vala), Rosita Sharafjahan, Jinoos Taghizadeh, Negar Tahsili, and Neda Zarfsaz presents the current image of the social and personal realities of Tehran and its inhabitants.

Curatorial statement of the piece by Sandra Skurvida:

“Our vision is conditioned—attuned to the environment in which we live, thus we see certain things and, due to non-recognition and thus non-comprehension, turn a blind eye on others. We carry our views along wherever we go, and as our vision adjusts in movement, our views evolve and change along the way. Self-scrutiny under the camera zoom, as it were, maps visual topographies of the mind, creating conjunctions between the outer reality and its inner vision. The dreamlike sequence of the film by Neda Zarfsaz, its upside-down world seen through a window of a slowly moving vehicle, casts this rainy European city in the viewfinder as would-be Tehran, conjured up as a somewhat foreign object in an expanded field of vision, asserting increasingly fluid coordinates of the topography of self, reconciling belonging and estrangement.”

WordPress Portfolio