press zohreh eskandari

Journal intime, Zohreh Eskandari des pages arrachées au printemps 2003.

Superpositions et surexpositions de lambeaux retravaillés à la lame électronique. Un journal intime d'aujourd'hui. Une femme à sa fenêtre électronique. Qui regarde monter les vagues alarmistes dans la petite lucarne. Sur fond de rythmes vitaux/eaux, un portrait de l'artiste en madone multimédia. Une piéta iranienne au fils qui va s'abolir, pour partir à Téhéran. Non loin d'un théâtre de guerre. Avec des acteurs qui tuent pour rafraîchir l'écran. Sans toucher le bouton F5. Juste un FM. Tout cela emplit un univers en "cameras obscuras" enchâssées. Où la Vie s'infiltre. Affecte. Même et surtout l'environnement intime. Tendu par un réseau de scarifications, entrelacs sensoriels. Une toile de fond imprégnée d'un monde extérieur empli de résonances martiales. Ceci est un journal intime qui voit l'aube du XXI ème siècle se lever. La lumière lèche la peau pour mieux la mordre. Ombres et lumières.Ceci est un vrai-faux documentaire. Comme dans son précédent travail, la réalité filmée de Zohreh Eskandari se pigmente d'une émotion à fleur de pixels. Et revient une fois encore ce thème du poisson errant. Ailleurs l'eau est plus claire… Même quête aquatique. Sans doute du Graal pré-natal. Et cela de génération en génération. De film en film. De cadres en cadres. De plans en plans. Les images répondent aux images. Les installations de Zohreh à celles des médias. En appartement. Comme base arrière.

Michel Pourcelot
Journalist

Iranian Video Art as an Exclusive Advance

Video art enjoys an original literature in Iran. Video artists combine many different ways of using video equipments in order both to create and to record a variety of artistic expressions. This present collection covers a wide spectrum of styles and approaches towards the concepts of life, individual dilemmas, and social affairs.

Video art and video art practitioners
Since the turn of the century, most video art practitioners in Iran have come to this medium via other art forms: painting (Khosro Khosravi), graphic arts (Ebrahim Haghighi), photography (Maryam Niazadeh), film (Abbas Kirostami and Dariush Mehrjui), or conceptual and performance art (Barbad Golshiri, and Neda Razavipour).
Beyond the simple recording of an event or the use of TV equipment to make literal, ironic, or parodic statements, there is an enormous range of possibilities in using the video screen as a canvas, "painting" on it with professional video equipment and various special devices, some of them run by computer.
The vacant port in the shore of life, in Khosro Khosravi’s The Port (2004), describes the border between the sea horizon and us, a port to observe things; a small hatch for us to glance through the life beyond. It is a metaphor on our history and time where borders Persia from the Northerners; and modern Iranians are their successors. As in a painting, the port depicts our knowledge from time and position, race and tribes, us and a vague future, presented with the kid, his dog, his return, the sea waves, his running into people in different social classes, and the epic poetry of Ferdowsi: all are motifs of our spontaneous perceptions.
Applying the same approach, Rozita Sharaf-Jahan’s Deepression (2004) portrays the frame where time halts, everything stops, there is no way to go and nothing to hear, images fade. There is only a will, in which the character goes in the very depth and rises unwillingly.
Video art has always been a product of what the available equipment allowed artists to do. With the very small, from lightweight 8-mm camcorders to hi-tech DVD equipments and the graphics and animation capabilities of home computers, Iranian artists today (from the 22-year-old Barbad Golshiri to the 55-year-old Ebrahim Haghighi) can own many of the tools needed to produce a new generation of work in video art.

Language and techniques
Iranian video art, in its simplest manifestations, provides videotaped documents of musical and dramatic performances, of performance art, of on-the-street happenings, or even of self-portraits in motion of the artist at work. In this kind of usage, the video camera performs the same function, as a motion picture camera, except that the resulting videotape can be shown on a television receiver immediately after it is shot, allowing performers, for example in Farshad Fadaian’s Borders (not included in this collection), to see their work in progress. Videotape editing and the addition of special effects are usually done in the artist's studio, using relatively inexpensive and easily available video devices. Having a different attitude toward video installation, a sculpture of The Seated Woman (by Neda Razavipour, 2002) of semi-transparent material in its original video installation form (here presented as a video piece) can be seen with her face: hands and bag show still and animated pictures. Pictures expose her thoughts and fantasies, a moment of her life.

This exhibition presents a broad range of techniques and artistic ideas, from the use of abstract special effects (Sun Alphabets by Maryam Niazadeh) to documentary and narrative themes (Stranger by Amaneh Zohreh Eskandari). Techniques range from primitive black-and-white images (What Has Befallen Us, Barbad? by Barbad Golshiri) to sophisticated, polished work in full colour (Through the Small Gates of Loneliness by Simin Keramati).
With The Stranger, Ameneh Zohreh Eskandari introduces colour and value as visual elements. She notes: “In the beginning there was a shadow, … the shadow whispered and stepped in a journey so that it could play the music of its soul. It walked everywhere gazing upon everything; to anything, which existed. The ray of its glance was changed into the colour of its imagination. It made the colours move. The existence rose as a floating flag under its footsteps. All things became as an imagination entirely, farther than the shadow spreading on it.”

December 21 and 22 - 2004

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