“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.” - Baudrillard.”
The solo show “Doubt” by Iranian artist Atousa Bandeh leaves one high and dry in where one might find himself under the news bombardment of unrest and fire and fury. The significant difference from the daily bombardment is in the direction where this exhibition takes the viewer. Surrounded by multi-size and multimedia artworks, instead of de-sensitization proper of the age of horizontalist social media numbing, her works make a new sensation, embedding the daily with the timeless, the mythical with the political, and the far with the objects close by.
The exhibition consists of some large paintings which skin-like layers of plastic.
The paintings depict a time and an interiority of our 'normal' afternoons in front of the TV, while the TV frames remind us of cinematic cultural references, typical to Bandeh's work, who indeed is a post-cinematic painter. From Moses conducting a miracle to masses on the street with fire and greenlight in their background, one feels like waking up from a dream that has just taken a few millennials. A vision that is reinforced through the presence of the plaster cast sculptures, which have merged with the gallery walls: Atousa combines element from classical art with contemporary subjects as simple as daily groceries, exploring the texture of a material as humble and controverse as plastic, which has undoubtedly played a central role in her practice of these recent years.
The exhibition’s landscape reconstructs our everyday life plus their constant mythical implications that we thought so much we have distanced ourselves from. In the artist's words, the landscape before us is of a "multiscreen set.” The modern myths of our beliefs are brought to the same temporality as the myths we looked down at so sarcastically with our liberal democratic arrogance. Now the artist gives us all we had hoped for:
Believing in what we wanted to believe. She exposes the flaw we had in our assumption that we had got over the myths. The myth of the new, the news myths, the naïve trust in politics, with the seasonal rotations of antagonists and protagonists who run through the city, and the fast movement of snaps before our eyes, a fallen plastic bag with crushed vegetables, abandoned among the unrest, pierces our memories. Doubt puts the taken for granted on trial.
Opening: Saturday 20th March, 13:00 - 18:00
Click here reserve your time slot:
https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-doubt-solo-show-by-atousa-bandeh-145660443307
Show running until May the 8th, 2021.