GREEN ART GALLERY PRESENTS ‘A PERMANENT RECORD FOR FUTURE INVESTIGATION’, CURATED BY KAMROOZ ARAM
UAE Government News
October 21, 2012 Sunday 6:30 AM EST
Dubai, Oct. 21 — The show will feature the work of five artists –
Nazgol Ansarinia, Talia Chetrit, Iman Issa, Mehreen Murtaza, and Hajra
Waheed – whose practices use image-making as a means to negotiate
the question of representation. For these artists, representation is
understood as a depiction of a space or an object, a description of
an event, the writing of history, or the rendering of a memory.
In contemporary visual culture, we are well aware of the use of
technology to manipulate images, primarily by way of Photoshop
and other digital imaging applications. Our eyes are increasingly
trained to view media images with suspicion. Despite this, the average
viewer of images still takes for granted the photograph as a truthful
depiction of reality and/or history. And this, in fact, has been the
case since the advent of photography. Even before digital imaging,
images were manipulated through staging and “special effects,” collage,
and at times through a simple recontextualization of the subject.
The artists included in this exhibition take on the history of
image-making and the notion of the image as historical document. They
challenge our understanding of the image as truth through an
investigation of form and a conjuring of a variety of historical
references. For these artists, the meaning of objects and spaces are
dependent on the context in which they exist. The idea of truth or
reality in an image is assumed to be subjective and malleable. The
lines between documentation and fiction are blurred; narratives are
not linear and archives do not follow rules of logic.
In her series, Subtractions/Refractions, Nazgol Ansarinia presents two
newspaper articles about the same event. These articles are cut out
of their respective newspapers and collaged together, using patterns
derived from Iranian mirror mosaics known as Ayene Kari or Mirrorwork.
In this traditional art form, mirror tiles are cut into intricate
patterns, leaving the viewer with a reflection that, although
spectacular, appears as a kaleidoscopic distortion of the reality
it reflects. Likewise, Ansarinia sees the intended role of the
newspaper as reflecting reality within society, but as one reads two
different perspectives in two different newspapers, it is clear that
this reality is subject to the storyteller’s perspective. Thus, the
artist’s resulting image is, though visually seductive, nonetheless
unintelligible in its attempt to describe any event at all.
Talia Chetrit’s photographs, primarily shot in the studio, appear to
be straightforward and formal, exploring the concept of subject and
process in photography. But as one moves beyond the formal, a chain of
references begins to unravel, revealing an astute investigation of the
function and history of photography and the role of image-making and
its cultural, historical and social significance. With references to
surrealism, cubism and stock-photography, the artist dismantles the
hierarchies that inform our views of both the subject and the medium
(photography) in which the subject is depicted.
In Modular Sculpture, 2011, Chetrit simultaneously presents two
different views of a mass-produced modular sculpture. Through the
process of photography, this object is transformed from everyday
kitsch into an elegant Modern sculpture. Shot from multiple views in
a flattened space, this work highlights the limitations of the medium
of photography, while at the same time demonstrating photography’s
ability to represent an object in a specific and controlled manner,
influencing the meaning of that object and challenging the viewer
to develop new relationships to both photography and sculpture,
and their deeply established histories.
In Hajra Waheed’s Anouchian Passport Portrait Series, the artist has
accessed an archive of portraits by an Armenian photographer named
Antranik Anouchian, who lived and worked in Tripoli, Lebanon in the
mid-20th century. 198 of Anouchian’s portraits, found in the collection
of the Arab Image Foundation, have been categorized by Waheed into
two groups of 99 portraits of men and 99 portraits of women, and then
recreated as a series of pencil drawings. In these reproductions,
the artist’s eyes function as a scanner and her hand as a printer,
rendering the portraits through a slow and mechanical unveiling. The
resulting images are light and ephemeral, allowing space for the viewer
to project an identity onto these anonymous faces. For this exhibition,
Waheed debuts a new series, “Side Profiles: A Study From the Anouchian
Passport Portrait Series.” The 6 profiles from this series consist
of 3 pairs of portraits of 3 different men. Each pair of portraits
is sourced from the same photograph. However, once the photograph
is mediated by drawing, the portraits are no longer identical. The
variations in tone and the uneven application of marks cause slight
distortions in the men’s features and complicate the relationship
between the two images.
The Dubious Birth of Geography, an installation of 15 photographs
by Mehreen Murtaza, appears as a wall of documentation, perhaps as
seen from another planet unaccustomed to our historical logic. In
this work, Murtaza has collected images documenting historical events
and intervened in them, creating science fiction-like revisions. The
historical photograph, our most trusted visual documentation, now
depicts events that stem from conspiracy theories, mythological tales
and miraculous events. By appropriating the aesthetics of history books
and documentary photography, the artist flattens the playing field
and allows for fact, myth and magic to contribute to the narrative in
equal parts. Through the absurdist lens in which the artist presents
history, the viewer is forced to renegotiate her understanding of
how images have shaped who we are today, and the power of images to
influence how we understand ourselves in the future.
In Iman Issa’s triptychs, the viewer is presented with three related,
but autonomous elements. Issa’s ritualistic process begins with a
snapshot of a location that has personal significance to the artist.
This straightforward and seemingly unassuming documentation
of space becomes the starting point for the second element in
the triptych. For this image, the photographer takes the sensate
memories and associations evoked in her by the original space, and
concretizes them by constructing what she terms “settings,” which are
then photographed and displayed as a framed still-life in the center
of the triptych.
However, by the time the setting has been photographed, the new image
is now foreign to the artist and is so removed from the original
location that she might be seeing it for the first time. Thus,
the third element in the triptych becomes a fresh response to this
setting, as if the artist had never seen it before. Issa’s process
is at once performative, playful and ritualistic, navigating memory,
documentation and narrative through a poetic approach that allows the
viewer space for participation. Perhaps the fourth element in these
works is the viewer’s own associations with each successive element.
Born in Shiraz, Iran in 1978, Kamrooz Aram received his MFA from
Columbia University in 2003 and his BFA from the Maryland Institute
College of Art in Baltimore in 2001. He has had solo shows at the
Perry Rubenstein Gallery, NY, LAXART, Los Angeles, CA and Massachusetts
Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Massachusetts.
He has shown in several important groups shows including roundabout
(2010), the Busan Biennale (2006), P.S.1/MoMA’s Greater New York
2005, and the Prague Biennale I (2003). His work has been featured
and reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum.com and
Bidoun among others. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Green Art Gallery is a contemporary art gallery based in Dubai, UAE.
Representing a multi-generational mix of artists, the gallery’s
program is focused on contemporary artists from the Middle East, North
Africa, South Asia, Turkey and beyond, working across different media,
traditional and new, who employ a research based approach.