Dark Smoke
56", B&W Screen, On Loop
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Two videos, 56", B&W Screen, On Loop
This video installation has a reference to a scene at the Andalusian Dog by Luice Bunuel which seems that a man slash open with a razor a woman's eye.
Also there is a visual reference to commercial make up advertisements. In a totem like setting, a woman wearing sormeh (traditional Iranian make up) juxtaposed with a knife shaped applicator obscuring the beauty and violence as the applicator goes through the eyes.
The setting has the same height as myself which representing human body while the simple cubical structure indicate the industrialized side off the beauty that constitutes an environment for business.
This video installation has a reference to a scene at the Andalusian Dog by Luice Bunuel which seems that a man slash open with a razor a woman's eye.
Also there is a visual reference to commercial make up advertisements. In a totem like setting, a woman wearing sormeh (traditional Iranian make up) juxtaposed with a knife shaped applicator obscuring the beauty and violence as the applicator goes through the eyes.
The setting has the same height as myself which representing human body while the simple cubical structure indicate the industrialized side off the beauty that constitutes an environment for business.
Amorphousness of Love
Time based sculpture (7-8 Hours to disappear), Sugar, Water, Copper, Plexi plate.
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I remember visiting the Abgineh Glass Museum in Tehran when I found the odd-shaped glass containers; each featured a dramatic curve in their long, narrow neck. The remarkable stirring form had a strong reciprocal relation with it’s traditional usage: when a husband was out for a war or a long trip, the wife (or the lover) would keep her tears in the bottle called Ashk-Don in Farsi, or “Tears Container”. Upon his return, she would gift him the tears to show him how much she missed him.
A few years after that visit, living separately from my beloved ones, became an era of “Tears Containers” for me. Modified their function by making them out of sugar, I explored the contradictory to subtexts of ephemerality, love, loss, pleasure and pain.
My tears container would break down with humid or heat easily. Even humans breathe or body’s temperature would change it and eventually put an end to their existence. These ephemeral sculptures represent the amorphous pleasure of love and its accompanying melancholy. The bitterness of tears in relation to the sweetness of sugar echoes the irony of interwoven sorrow and desire experienced in any form of love.
Turtles Cry When They Fly
Time based sculpture, depends on the humidity and temperature.
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I found a
container made out of sugar that is used to fill tears—a proper vessel to
contain a story of war and love. One of the most beautifully depicted stories
of war and love that I have ever seen is the movie “Turtles Can Fly”. It
pictures story about the hearts and lives of children and youth in the world of
ceaseless war.
The installation of my piece “Turtles Cry When They Fly”, is slowed-down footage from the movie, projected through a tears container casted from sugar. The sound** is an evidence of a happening, but the image is too abstract to reveal the nature of the event.
The container deforms by the heat of the projected image, people’s presence (breath and body temperature), and time; As if the continued sorrows annihilates the fragile existence of the vessel.
*By Bahman Ghobadi, 2003
**Original music for the film by Hossein Alizadeh
The installation of my piece “Turtles Cry When They Fly”, is slowed-down footage from the movie, projected through a tears container casted from sugar. The sound** is an evidence of a happening, but the image is too abstract to reveal the nature of the event.
The container deforms by the heat of the projected image, people’s presence (breath and body temperature), and time; As if the continued sorrows annihilates the fragile existence of the vessel.
*By Bahman Ghobadi, 2003
**Original music for the film by Hossein Alizadeh