Disposables, Video (4k) with sound, 7:09 minutes, 2015
Borrowing gestures from media imagery of street protests and different emancipatory political movements between 2009-2013 across West Asia and North Africa, “Disposables” picks up the story from the unnoticed frames before and after those “decisive moments” captured by the media and translates those moments through the corporal medium of body, exposing the viewer to a series of images shaped by moments of intermission and slowness. “Disposables” translates the simularca of violence portrayed by media to a state of immediacy and ephemerality of a group of bodies occupying the space. The film revolves around several choreographed sequences of body movements performed and improvised for the camera which are then connected by a fictional narrative of political dystopia told by an anonymous storyteller.
“Disposables” was written, produced, and directed during my one-year long residency at the Chicago Artist Coalition and was installed at my solo exhibition “Spatial Agreements” at Chicago Artist Coalition in 2015. My occupation with the role of camera in the formation of institutional histories, collective memory as well as the volatile position of a photograph in attributing (or depriving) agency to its subjects, was the point of departure for this project, “Disposables”. The visual perception and visibility have always been part of our human existence, though it was by invention of photography that, as Ariella Azoulay points out, the gaze could accompany action (The Civil Contract of Photography, 2012). As Azoulay postulates, photography’s frame of reference is not so dissimilar to a “community”: a community in which photography, photographer, photographed and spectator are all part of the action and the gaze, despite their intention or even lack of intention. Although Azoulay was more concerned with what I dissect as the moral composition of a photograph, I would like to borrow her notion of plurality or community of a photograph to another realm of discussion. Here the photograph with all its contributors, is no longer an immobile surface, it has become an object of its own, and surprisingly is no longer a mere photograph, but rather an image and at some point an image outside of the confinements of its own frame.
World premiere: VIDEONALE Festival of video and time-based arts, Kunstmusuem Bonn, Germany, Feb-March 2017
Read the review of “Disposables” at VIDEONALE 16, Kunstmusuem Bonn, Germany 2017.
+a full online version of the video is available on my Vimeo page, and is accessible in the above gallery.