jenseits, 2013
‘The Wall of Europe, Paese Museo, San Sperate, Sardinia, Italy, 2013
Video
Duration: 00.03.06
jenseits (‘beyond’ in German), [...], is a short video about my childhood room in Tehran. The video consists of four sequenced spaces: a room, a balcony, a garden, and an alleyway. The video starts with an image of a white curtain that veils the balcony, the garden, and the alley. The wind repeatedly opens and closes the curtain, thereby merging these spaces into one unified entity that is neither fully private nor fully public. To recall the words of Victor Turner, it is ‘neither here nor there; it is betwixt and between.’12 In the video, this spectacle continues as the curtain restlessly curls across the boundaries of these fours spaces until the window abruptly shuts and the audience is faced with the image of a motionless curtain. The work speaks of the ambiguous gray area between the private and public that exists in much of contemporary Iranian domestic architecture. jenseits is the result of having experienced this liminal mode of dwelling, and tries to convey this to the audience, as it continues to evoke my own sense of dwelling. The video is not independent from my experience of such places.
Jenseits: Place, Dwelling and Art Practice’, written by Farniyaz Zaker, Oxford Artistic and Practice-Based Research Platform (OAR), Issue 1 (2017), http://www.oarplatform.com/jenseits-place-dwelling-art-practice