Textonpractice
sara's text on the practice
my whole practice began with my nude self-portrait project which is a long term project since i was thirteen and expand on three other projects during the first trimester of my master.
nude self-portraits project
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 stopped this project after I migrated to the Netherlands for my master's because i started struggeling with my sexual life and trying to find out how i identify myself as a woman and my sex life which still is a taboo in iran.
I have been working on 3 projects below since then, which I would like to expand on.
eye project "silence" - 4 minutes, about the Iran revolution
I made a short film, and my main approach was for non-Iranians to take action about the movement in Iran. I believe everyone in the world can have a normal life because of feminism and the women’s rights movement. Every person that believes in feminism or women's rights could do something about what has been going on in Iran. the film is 03:58 minutes. Through the images, there is an Iranian song playing in the background which has a very sentimental feeling for Iranians and I wanted to give a dreamy, makes you feel it’s not real, feeling to the atmosphere of the film with that. 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. All of the questions were chosen out of a very dramatic story that happened in Iran and their purpose is to add another layer of not feeling real to the atmosphere. They are really emotional and kinda silly at the same time. They are not supposed to give a direction to the audiences but they just want to make them think about them. It displays a very normal life of a Rotterdam inhabitant. For instance, people walking down the street or talking to each other, or going somewhere with their child. Everything that would remind a Rotterdamer of their life and is familiar to them. It reminds the audience that they have this freedom of a normal life because other people fought for these rights in the past.
in terms of technical decisions, I implemented the use/faking of long lenses with my camera to heighten the sense of distance. I chose to use my personal camera which is a sony alpha 7riii to capture the moving images and try to get the best quality out of them. 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 either so dangerous or again, dangerous for being caught by the authorities. Of course, I have had cameras before in the streets of Iran but all I can remember from that is being arrested by the authorities. I wanted the pictures to be beautiful and poetic, not just documentaries. the practice of creating such things was a very good learning point in my artistic path which i was not used to. the final result came out satisfying to me.
In the western world, I think we forget to use our privileges. If you believe that men and women are equal and that women can have all the rights to do whatever they want, then you believe in feminism. I'm made this film to remind people that they can actually use this freedom of speech. I think that nobody expects you to care, but if you care and take action on it, you can say that you’re a feminist or believe that everyone should be equal.
photo series - ambiguity -
Ambiguity is a series of street photography, taken in Rotterdam. The photos are black and white, and this stylistic choice is connected to the message i am attempting to convey in the work.
Very much inspired by the text (vistas of modernity decolonial aesthesis and the end of the contemporary) I read in the "Is it possible to talk about power and violence without showing their depictions?" seminar- I draw a connection between colonialism and totalitarianism and am focused on understanding and fighting back against the removal of meaning that runs rampant today. With totalitarian governments and societies, Both try to impose ideology over people, taking away their individual identity, we see humans be reduced to 'the same', This frustrates, angers but also inspires me to make works that explore and challenge this, as seen in this series.
The timing of a strong fog in the city was a major accelerator for me to grab my camera and hit the streets. 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'.
In terms of technical decisions i made while capturing these candid moments, again, i implemented the use/faking of long lenses 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 repeated 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 my 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 would like to explore how i can also evoke other emotions and atmospheric feelings, in different climates and weather, not necessarily just with fog.
It is still in development. I am continuously learning and I realized that i need to focus on one of them in order to really understand colonialism or totalitarianism.
youtube video series
it is about my personal journey, transformation, and life change from being a depressed unhappy person to being a happy and confident person. Telling my story is really important because the environment that the people of Iran are living in, is made for them to be toxic. society and the culture of open-minded people in Iran are really toxic to the point that I could not be myself anymore and had to wear this mask of fakeness all the time, in order to improve my net worth and be succesfull in life. I got bullied and limited so much by society's toxic rules that I believed that I was the problem and I had to change who i was in order to fit into society. i want to show other people who are living in this situation that I was, that there is nothing wrong with them and can be themselves and yet get appreciation for who they are. The series is in Farsi now but I am thinking to make translating of 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 my 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 releasing every week on youtube.
the connection between all of the works i did till now is that they all have an underlying layer of political matter as a starting point, i am trying to not be political. i observe a lot, i overthink, i start a project only when it's clear in my head, and when i can clearly see it, i try to connect dots in my head together. it works like photoshop in my head. starting with a blank page and adding layers until the whole picture is made in my mind.
my next project is i don know project - the question "how to make art?"
might be an abstract project. this project started from my obsession around the desire of not being a political artist. i found myself in this position of labeling myself a political artist because my whole practice so far has been revolving around political subjects. not that being a political artist is bad, i just know that i am capable of doing more than political and i want to experiment myself out of my history and background as an artist. struggling with labels and being hard on myself, one of my tutors suggested this artist [shiraze houshyari] to me who is an abstract artist and talk about making something out of what you do not know is. 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. i want to make pure art and i want to play with colors. i know that i want it to be a photography series but i want to experiment with it in film and audio. i am inspired of a ny photographer hasselblad ambassador named: ali faraji who has a photo series called in the dark of day. works with shadows a lot. i am thinking of playing with colors in the city and make abstract photography with colors and shades. in relation with the ambiguity project maybe?
Talk about why the artists inspire me.
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