For its second participation at Art Rotterdam, Ag Galerie will be presenting the work of four artists whose work involves the photographic object as the main medium of the finished work.
Parisa Aminolahi's “Stop Motions” series where nine fragments form a collage of short, ambiguous videos based on photographs taken by the artist. Each photograph is painted in the process. They are unrelated except in their construct and technique. Their arrangement might seem to encourage the viewer to try and find some semblance of a pattern or narrative, however, it is exactly this arrangement that will convince them of the futility of the task and instead will evoke emotions that may not be otherwise perceived, aroused, or understood. The concatenatious, manipulation of ambient sounds instead of music, plays an important role in creating a vague and suspended world. Each piece within the frame loops at varying durations ranging from 3 to 13 seconds, resulting in a barrage of moving imagery and sounds.
Ali Zanjani's series titled "Military Makeup" comes from an archive of ID photos taken in Kia Studio on Bahar Street in Tehran, Iran. Owned and operated by Mr Arbab from 1974 until his death in 2005, the archive was sold off by his family and acquired by Zanjani from a resale shop. After scanning and archiving the images, Zanjani discovered that through the characteristics of the subjects’ appearances, the photos revealed the historic events of Iran during their thirty-year span. This series of eleven photographs, captures the reluctance of these soldiers to cut their hair and the photographer’s technique to help them by concealing and editing the hair-styles using a red marker directly over the negatives. The results were id photographs with acceptable haircuts by the Islamic government of Iran.
Peyman Hooshmandzadeh's series of unique frames take its title from the word "tasyan" which in a northern dialect of Persian describes a feeling of loss and longing. Created following the artist’s personal losses, the series is a departure for Hooshmandzadeh’s usual style of documentary photography. Using appropriated images of lost loved ones from their childhood, the artist engaged in a cathartic creative process and gave shape to the physical representation of his feelings. Nails and pins reminiscent of pearls and gold and silver threads used in beautiful Qajar-era embroidery on velvet backgrounds for photograph displays, are hammered into each work in intricate designs surrounding photographs of deceased, immigrated and imprisoned individuals which include his mother, friends and even his daughter separated from him as a result of his divorce.
In Homayoun Sirizi's search of photographs of the carnations of the 1979 Revolution, the idealist women, men and children whose faces the artist came across, were always distant and strange. He never imagined that these very faces could again be seen on the streets: the faces of women holding flowers in one hand and the victory sign in the other, or of course their hair as a banner, flowing in the winds of freedom. The truth was that the carnations placed in the gun barrels of the photographs of 1979, wilted and withered away. However, those guns and bullets are always waiting to again bud within bodily earth. In that year, the people shouted this slogan at the military, “Ask it from Iran’s Army, were Bullets the right reply to FLOWer?” This question could again be heard years after that photograph of the 1979 Revolution was taken by David Burnett: from the screams pushed from women’s throats, who were this time not placing the flowers down the barrels of guns, but rather covering the hollow of where their eyes once sat but had now been shot by bullets. Burnett’s book is titled: 44 Days, Iran and the Remaking of the World. 44 years after those 44 days, again in Iran, a world is once more in the remaking…