Shattered Frames

Recent video work from Iran

Curated by Sohrab Kashani

Shattered Frames
Curated by Sohrab Kashani
In collaboration with Conflict Kitchen and the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University

Shattered Frames: Recent video work from Iran was part of The Iranian Film and Video Festival held during March 2016 in Pittsburgh. The Iranian Film and Video Festival highlighted recent Iranian cinema and video that explored the diversity of the Iranian experience through fiction and experimental storytelling. Shattered Frames: Recent video work from Iran was originally shown at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh on 17 March 2016.
Aliyar Rasti
Out Of Frame
2016
00:02:33
I had a project consisting of 6 video works titled Prologue. In these videos, I wanted to involve the audience in the running time. Actually I intended to make a capsule of time that audience is forced to abandon or at least ignore the time component. Also videos are of non-narrative nature. Since that project, I’ve been working on methods of narration during the past two years. Now, I mostly write and am considering including narration in my works. Out Of Frame is a prototype of these experiences. I tried to make semi-narrative using minimum narrative components. In fact a narrative which is not a narrative yet. I think for me, the process towards narrative in progress of my works is more important than achieving a tangible one. This was actually a removed part of Prologue which I returned to after two years and with new intention it became a separate video. One of the main components of this semi-narrative is what is happening outside the frame which in fact is a peripheral event.
Mamali Shafahi
Maybe/Public Love‌
2016
9:18
Maybe/Public Love is a 9-minute video that will eventually form the second part of Mamali Shafahi's full-length film Nature Morte, the final stage in the long-term project Daddy Sperm. As in the previous Daddy Sperm video installations, Maybe/Public Love projects the artist's parents into an imaginary world that pays homage to them, as his genitors, and brings them closer to his own. The video begins with Shafahi's father, Reza Shafahi, drawing an anonymous character and a cow. By combining selected sounds and music – pieces by Mount Kimbie and Jam Rostron, used here both as as sources of inspiration and as an artist's medium together with 3D imagery, the video develops these as elements in a rich assembly of references. Within a general framework of reference to the broad, Daddy Sperm themes of birth and creation; transmission from parents to children and, conversely, the transformation of parents by their children; life, passing time and death, the video also evokes more specific questions that have run through Shafahi's work over the past decade: sex, taboo and the breaking of taboo, private and public identity, gender among other things.
Maede Jenab
Now I See…
2014
00:06:15
My grandma passed away and she left us with lots of questions about her mind. Now a year has passed and she has started helping me understand her world by using signs and colors.
Samira Eskandarfar
I am Home
2015
00:06:53
When Manouchehr was only eighteen, the eight-year Iran-Iraq was not over yet. In order to complete his mandatory military services he had to fight in the war. His family sent him to Denmark instead to avoid the war. Manouchehr spent fourteen years in Denmark alone all by himself. Eventually he came back to Iran in 1999. Five months and six days later Manouchehr died of a heart attack at just thirty-two years of age. His mother never stopped mourning him until her passing years later.
Mina Bozorgmehr and Hadi Kamali Moghadam
Imagine-Native
2016
00:08:29
Imagine-Native is a love story of a man and a fairy. It is a journey to the depths of the beliefs, imaginations, and magic of the people of the southern Iran — Hormoz Island and the land of thousand-colored sands. This video enters the imaginary of a southern artist, “Mousa”, who collects worn out leg-covers of native women from the washed out rubbish of the shores, and puts them together to make tableaus that lay the groundwork of a modern legendary story. It has been told that there was once a tradition where people from the island offered the clothes of their dead to the Mother Sea, so that she would clean the departed’s soul.
Maryam Amini
Mimi Cries
2012
00:04:32
Mimi Cries is omniscience observing events surrounding it. She is as an elegy to an unknown terrifying future and a redemption by scarifying herself and existing in an incomplete world. She appears to be a Pietà, who instead of mourning her child is grieving over her own corpse. Her presence is the constant presence of infertility and the curtailed contemporary man dumbfounded by the incompleteness.
Yousha Bashir
No One Knows What is Beyond the Door
2016
00:01:22
The relation between light space and dark space to create a dynamical image has been important for me. This experimental video is a reaction to a dreadful situation and how to dominate it.
Farid Jafari
The Final Shot
2011
00:05:52
This is a situation that the Good American shoots and kills everyone like a murderer. He shoots people who are defending their country against the West. This video challenges an issue by means of it agrandisman. It is not against East or West, or any culture or country or tribe. It only pays attention to the media’s neo-liberalism that has befallen us all over the world. It has mythical control over the living and has made excuses in order to deprive people of their freedom. This is an exceptional situation that America attacks Afghans. That NATO attacks Iraq. That Syria, Egypt and so on allow direct conflict with their own people. This is an exceptional situation that allows governors to still have hope for their governing. And these bullets that are shot are not necessarily bullets. They can be waves of a happy radio broadcast that is forced to broadcast Breaking News, and this is enough to make an exceptional situation.
Shadi Noyani
Shutter & Shooter
2013
00:01:22
These pictures are from a large and rotten mirror in the Niavaran palace during the time that the Middle-East was burning in fire and blood. People who were visiting the Hall, accompanied me voluntarily and quietly while I photographed this large mirror, which itself was an observer; observing a part of Iran’s history. But Shutter & Shooter is the narrator of the documentary photographers, soldiers, mercenaries, militias and people who sometimes stand next to each other and sometimes against each other to play their role in the big game of one of those rotten mirrors and this old and wounded Middle-East.
Mahsa Biglow
I am Having a Dream
2011
00:05:15
These pictures are from a large and rotten mirror in the Niavaran palace during the time that the Middle-East was burning in fire and blood. People who were visiting the Hall, accompanied me voluntarily and quietly while I photographed this large mirror, which itself was an observer; observing a part of Iran’s history. But Shutter & Shooter is the narrator of the documentary photographers, soldiers, mercenaries, militias and people who sometimes stand next to each other and sometimes against each other to play their role in the big game of one of those rotten mirrors and this old and wounded Middle-East.