And After All We Are Just Ordinary People by Amin Davaie

Saturday Jul 17,2010 04:18 PM
By Parkingallery Team
In NEWS

Don’t miss Amin Davaie’s Photo Installation this week at Mohsen Art Gallery, opened yesterday is an impressive installation of 30 Digital frames bearing a portrait each and their gaze to the camera says a thousand words silently, the sound track is composed by Nima Pourkarimi and doubles the impact with cleverness and cruelty at the same time. The show is on view till 21 July. 2010, 4 – 8 pm and there is an artist talk is scheduled for Mon. 19th of July. 2010 From 6 to 8 pm.

Amin Davaie, photo installation 2010, Mohsen Art Gallery

Look at Me and Remember Yourself The past year was populated by deadly events that happened to us continuously without disruption. The burden of agony was manifestly reflected visually, normatively and vocally in the artworks of this or that gallery in different parts of the city. The artist citizen accepted a heavy dutyin these events and paid a high price for it However, among the witnesses of the event, photography as a medium turned into an interactive real-time medium and connected the picturesof the event to the most wide-spread media of mass communication Today, confronted with Amin Davaie’s work, one feels a historical lump in throat and sees the eyes of a nation who dreamt while standing in front of history accusing others Amin Davaie’s installation is made of thirty photo frames of eight inches in a 150 by 150cm square exhibited in a dark room. The multi-frame technique has succeeded in creating something between photography and motion pictures. The light on portraits is from the right hand side. The actors of this tragedy have been selected among citizens and young friends of the artists and put in front of the camera. The white andbright background resembles personal photographs: as in documentary photography, they are standing in front of us without any mediation The media of photography has the potential and the valuable content of naked and sharp reality. This quality has an immediacy which renders the mortality of life. On the other hand, photographs are undeniable documents in the face of alteration of truth hidden in subjects. In certain cases, it is a unique weapon against the oblivion and denial of formal media. In this cycle of value and anti-value, a representationof the challenge between life and death is exhibited This is a movie-like artwork in which certain frames have moved out of the orbit of regular movement. Or from a different viewpoint, they are images which through juxtaposition have turned into slowly moving motion pictures whose different aspects and hidden meanings wecomprehend by conceptual layering First of all, the installation implies that this group can represent the agents of protesting Secondly, the portraits constitute the common patterns of our society, and in a certain respect, they are the actors of a reality happeningnot in society but in the artist’s studio. They appear metaphorical Thirdly, by confronting us the group calls to judgment the collective consciousness of the beholder. In a minimalistic way, the work is comprised of LCDs in a designed dark space with a double meaning. The first meaning is that it surrounds the audience and the second, it recounts of an event in the insecure nights of a long wait of a prisoner illustrating his loneliness and fear of being lost in the dusts of time The images are accompanied with a heavy musical noise that like a medium fills the temporal gaps of the work and reconstructs vague andderogatory images happening to us. The musical text resembles the harsh sound of a cold metal scrubbed on audience’s nerves and reverberates passing through the swollen eyes of the performers in the empty space of the event. Their strange faces, in times tired, in timestortured, aggressive, innocent, surprised or metamorphosed, narratesIn front of them, we stare at the visage of history

ziaï / July 2010

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