time-based media
writing



  01


Where Words Fall Short        

                      We live in the shadows of what came before–post-colonial, post-industrial, post-modern. In the midst of the “post-” prefixes inhabit our contemporary moving images, comprising a plethora of narratives—each originating from a personal world; each possessing a long history; each claiming their unique aesthetics and engagement with a broader system.      

       Our art practices, layered, unflattened, always negotiating their space, engage in constant tension with the lingering old single story: one shaped by white supremacist patriarchy. The shared desire to create a new form of cinema motivates us and our guest artists. The same starting point leads to different paths, on each of which we thrive, make homes, and ask our shared inquiry: what the moving image has been, what it has become, and what does it dare to be?

  02


A Door Half Open: Reading Nazarbazi  
                       The 1979 Iranian revolution remade the country and its cinema. One of its most striking consequences was the prohibition of physical touch between men and women on screen. Within this visual and moral regime filmmaker Maryam Tafakory was born and raised. She understands it as she lives under the constant policing of women’s bodies, the surveillance of desire, and the underlying heterosexual hegemony.
       Yet, cinema possesses the endless possibility to manipulate reality. Through the exceptional manipulation of colors, found-footage, language, and sounds in Nazarbazi (2021), Tafakory transformes the absence of touch into a new form of intimacy, the imposed absence into a chosen one of creativity. Sourced from more than eighty post-revolution Iranian cinema and unfolding without dialogue or narrative, the nineteen-minutes experimental collage reveals a paradox of censorship: what censors attempt to erase often becomes more visible.

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