Textonpractice

My whole practice began with my nude self-portrait project which is a long-term project since I was thirteen until I arrived in Rotterdam for my master's 13 years later. This project signifies the life of a young Iranian woman, in height of her sexuality, that lives in an Islamic country. My focus is to show how I desire to empower my gender and identity, but society forces me to cover it in black. In Iran, sexuality and sensuality are forcefully merged. Women have no right to endure and empower themselves in Iran. In this project, I used my own body, the only safe and secret option, as a medium to discover the idea. My goal was to continue protesting this suppression; Iran has no place for women to follow a taboo such as beauty, sensuality, or nudity. I started struggling with my sexual life and trying to find out how I identify myself as a woman from the beginning of Iran’s revolution in September after I migrated to the Netherlands where the opportunity of making a short film for the EYE film museum in Amsterdam as a part of our program presented itself.

my main approach was for non-Iranians to take action about Iran’s revolution. I had 4 minutes to play with and I ended up at 03:58 minutes. I believe everyone in the world can have a normal life because of feminism and the women’s rights movement and in the western world, we forget to use our privileges like the freedom of speech. That is why I believe everyone could do something about what has been going on in Iran. I think that nobody expects you to care, but if you care and take action on it, you can say you believe that everyone should be equal.

I chose to work with the idea of a normal life, Very strange topic to me because I never knew what you could assume as “normal”. So I had to show Everything that would remind a Rotterdamer of their life and is familiar to them. For instance, people walking down the street or talking to each other, or going somewhere with their child. It reminds the audience that they have this freedom of a normal life because other people fought for these rights in the past. I chose to use my camera, a sony alpha 7riii, and implement the use/faking of long lenses to heighten the sense of distance from the audience’s point of view, to capture the moving images. it took a long experiment for me to get over my fears of having a camera in the streets in this project because I was so traumatized from not being able to have a camera in the streets of Iran. It was always dangerous for being caught by the authorities or be stolen. I wanted the pictures to be beautiful and poetic, not just documentaries. Creating such things was a perfect learning point in my artistic path which I was not used to. the final result came out satisfying to me.

The missing part was the connection between the pictures and what I wanted to convey. What is normal life and Freedom to have it? On the first day of the "Is it possible to talk about power and violence without showing their depictions?" seminar, we saw a short film that gave me the connection I was looking for. The narrative and how I could work with it in an abstract way.

I chose a sentimental feeling Iranian song for the background when the audience will hear a series of questions, that they can/can not relate to, starting with do you remember? Do you remember the last time you said I love you to your daughter? for instance. I wanted to give a dreamy, makes you feel it’s not real, feeling to the atmosphere of the film with that decision. The questions are not supposed to give a direction to the audience and were chosen out of a very dramatic story that happened in Iran. after 4 minutes of not knowing, the film ends with a few sentences honoring the people who have died fighting for freedom in Iran.

I was Very much inspired by the text (vistas of modernity decolonial aesthesis and the end of the contemporary) I read in the seminar. Speaking of equality and identity, I draw a connection between colonialism and totalitarianism and was focused on understanding and fighting back against the removal of meaning that runs rampant today. Totalitarian governments and societies, Both try to impose ideology over people, taking away their identity, and we see humans be reduced to 'the same', This frustrated, and angered me but also inspired me to make works that explore and challenge this. The timing of an intense fog in the city at the time I was making my EYE film was a major accelerator for me to grab my camera and hit the streets to make the Ambiguity series. The fog has a sort of magical and almost intimidating effect, in my opinion, it can be read as violence, and it also tends to make the people it surrounds be engulfed in it, also reflecting this notion of 'the same'.

The photos I took are black and white, and this stylistic choice is connected to the message I am attempting to convey in the work. I implemented the use/faking of long lenses once again to heighten the sense of distance and disconnect. This allowed for a sort of compression of space, something adding to the overwhelming feeling of the fog, and the city and its size- something that was repeatedly on show through the use of vertical/portrait format, often highlighting large buildings, light poles, structures, etc. I felt free as a creator while making this series. The documentary, street approach allowed me possibilities that are not always available in my practice where I am often working in controlled and sometimes private portraiture sessions. I would often find a frame I enjoyed in terms of environment and would wait (sometimes long!) for a human to enter the frame and interact or add the final 'element'.

Moving forward, I am interested in continuing this approach, potentially with other mediums like film/analog something I have lots of experience with. Additionally, I am inspired by NY photographer Hasselblad's ambassador Ali Faraji works with shadows a lot in a photo series called in the dark of day. .  I would like to explore how I can also evoke other emotions and atmospheric feelings, in different climates and colors, not necessarily just with fog. I am continuously learning and I realized that I need to focus on one of them to understand colonialism or totalitarianism which is why this project is still under development.

The eye film project was the only thing I focused on during the winter break and when I came back to school, the situation in Iran has calmed down a little. I was ready to go back to my past one more time and start the series I wanted to make for almost a year. The youtube video series, a new life abroad. I believe telling my story is important because, after all of what happened, I realized the environment people of Iran are living in, is made for them to be toxic. society and the culture of open-minded people in Iran are so toxic to the point, I was sure I was the problem and I had to change who I was in order to fit into society and had to wear this mask of fakeness all the time. By showing my journey, transformation, and life change from this depressed unhappy person to a happy and confident person, I want to tell them there is nothing wrong with them and can be themselves and yet get an appreciation for who they are.

The series is in Farsi now but I am considering translating it for my non-Iranian friends who happen to like the series. in terms of technical choices, I use archive footage that I filmed with an iPhone that I have from where I was living in Iran and the whole story is around that time I was living there. it is 8 to 10 episodes and it is released every week on youtube. The reason behind choosing youtube as a platform was to invite Iranian people to use youtube more and connect with the outside world of what the government has made for them. I stopped making the youtube series when I got busy with the IFFR and the question of “how to make art?” started to grow inside of my head.

I realized all of the works I did till now have an underlying layer of political matter as a starting point. I found myself in this position of labeling because my whole practice so far has been revolving around political subjects. not that being a political artist is bad, I just want to experiment out of my history and background as an artist. struggling with labels and the question “how to make art?”, one of my tutors, David, suggested this artist [shiraze houshyari] to me who is an abstract artist. she talks about making something out of what you do not know. making without knowing what are you making. I decided to put all of my political ideas which I find valuable on hold, and try to find value in not knowing. This obsession shifted to another level with the workshop “a history of hand made films” by nan wag. I discovered The world of well-composed abstract art came from very minimal and simple materials. I was amazed by the idea of making art with materials that not everybody thinks of, like what nan did in her practice. I still am a lot obsessed with this process and I ask myself this question how can I make art out of the simplest materials? When I explored touch designer software, I made something very beautiful out of nothing with it and decided that I wanted to make the same thing as “an optical poem” by Oskar Fischinger which inspired me, with Iranian music. The conversation I had with David before the workshop, added another level of understanding and excitement to make something and then decide what it is. Making without knowing. I feel finally free enough to put a value on my surroundings and not just specific subjects that I find valuable. this encourages me to make more art than to think about making art.

Now that spring break is over I am confident to say that I picked up all of the projects I put on hold, like Ambiguity and A new life abroad, and I am working on them alongside of not knowing. They are all under development and I can not be happier about what I am making.

references :