© 2013 ch-arts
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PREVIEW
SWISS PAVILION
VENICE BIENNALE 2005/
SHAHRYAR NASHAT
12.06.2005 - 06.11.2005
La Biennale di Venezia
51st International Art Exhibition
Giardini
Venezia - Italy
http://www.labiennale.org
Open:
Closed:
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10am-6pm
Mondays
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Hide and Seek, 2005, 16mm-film installation on DVD, loop - Concept and editing: Shahryar Nashat. Camera: Cristina Gauttieri
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SHADOWS COLLIDE WITH PEOPLE
SHAHRYAR NASHAT
Shahryar Nashat was born in Iran in 1975 and grew up in Switzerland. He has never been at home in the place of his birth. But at home in Geneva, Persian prevailed and it was not the language spoken in school, on the street, outside. That was French. So he was always exposed to several languages.
Possibly that is why the language of his video installations is often subtext, a language that speaks under what is being said and that develops under what is promised. His language is the language underneath speech. It is a translation, a promise. For Jacques Derrida, translation is another word for the impossible. Shahryar Nashat promises us the impossible.[1] Every time his figures speak or language blends into the picture, it is "the promise of the still unheard-of language … of a sole poem previously inaudible."
"We had the idea of repeating ourselves. ... She can't keep a hold of herself, it keeps on moving. ... All the way back, the reconstruction: ... There are facts, a man running out of a room, leaving a man lying on a bed. The man lying on a bed is lying on a clean, barely unmade bed in a gloomy room with a gloomy light. He's got no real reason to be lying on a bed. No more reason than the man running out of the room. Because what just happened has no importance. ... And then he’s meant to disappear." [2]
Shahryar Nashat's language does not speak under what is revealed, although the visible displays an ineradicable presence in his works. He investigates the psychological and political structures of our existence underneath the evidence of a structure and reveals the aesthetics of human flaws and the beauty of fascist architecture behind the façade of seeing. His language surfaces under what is spoken and his pictures become visible under the visible. And what we see and read provokes a sensibility that precedes the sensible, and one questions what is spoken and shown before it has been said or revealed. He shows us how we long to have an identity before identity is even brought into play. His works generate a suggestion and target us before anything has made an appearance. Everything is already there, underneath us, where we don’t want to live although it is where we are at home.
Text: Stefan Banz
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[1] See Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, Stanford University Press, California 1998, p. 67.
[2] This quotation consists of titles of video installations produced between 2000 and 2003 and an extract from Shahryar Nashat's piece, All the way back, the reconstruction, 2001. See Shahryar Nashat, We had the idea of repeating ourselves, self-published, 2003.
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