Green Art Gallery presents A Permanent Record For Future Investigation, an exhibition curated by New York-based artist Kamrooz Aram. 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The artists included in this exhibition take on the history of image-making and the notion of the image as historical document. They challenge our understanding of the image as truth through an investigation of form and a conjuring of a variety of historical references.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, reflections/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.
Artists
