Screen shot From ‘Manjil winds’ film, 2022, 24’ 10”
"Manjil Winds" is a film that explores the traces of patriarchy in Iran through the story of Afshan, a woman who loses custody of her children after her husband divorces her. The film interweaves Afshan's story with the development of the Manji Dam, using both storylines to highlight the challenges and struggles faced by women in a society with strict gender roles and expectations. The film touches on themes of family, loss, and the struggle for independence, and highlights the ways in which the patriarchal structure of Iranian society impacts the lives and experiences of women.
By juxtaposing Afshan's story with the larger societal issues at play, the film offers a nuanced and thought-provoking exploration of patriarchy and its effects on women in this particular cultural and historical context.
‘Permanent Holiday’
Permanent Holiday is an accidental interruption in a holiday as it meets the everyday life of two seagulls in Istanbul. This "moving pause" as Walter Benjamin calls it, is only set in motion when the inherent qualities of the ordinary - repetition and duration - are encountered through an "other"; a moment of rupture through which the ordinary reflects upon itself as alienated. The "other" here enables the alienation of self towards an emancipatory moment, as the squawking seagulls and their presence is the foreground to the absent or almost shadowy presence of the human subject walking or breathing in the background. The accidental superiority of the human achieved by the technological means of the mobile camera capturing the seagulls in her gaze, is reversed by the presence of the seagulls as free subjects within the frame (they come close, look at the window, and leave when they want), and their agency expressed through the soundscape. The enigma which arises with the muteness of one seagull opening and closing its beak, as if communicating within a non-audible sound range, demonstrates a non-purposive and accident-like frame within which the self performs itself freely. What are the particularities of an ordinary within which we can experience - or that connects to - our freedom? How to arrive at a permanent holiday within the everyday?
text by Aras Amiri
https://vimeo.com/725626913
Permanent Holiday is an accidental interruption in a holiday as it meets the everyday life of two seagulls in Istanbul. This "moving pause" as Walter Benjamin calls it, is only set in motion when the inherent qualities of the ordinary - repetition and duration - are encountered through an "other"; a moment of rupture through which the ordinary reflects upon itself as alienated. The "other" here enables the alienation of self towards an emancipatory moment, as the squawking seagulls and their presence is the foreground to the absent or almost shadowy presence of the human subject walking or breathing in the background. The accidental superiority of the human achieved by the technological means of the mobile camera capturing the seagulls in her gaze, is reversed by the presence of the seagulls as free subjects within the frame (they come close, look at the window, and leave when they want), and their agency expressed through the soundscape. The enigma which arises with the muteness of one seagull opening and closing its beak, as if communicating within a non-audible sound range, demonstrates a non-purposive and accident-like frame within which the self performs itself freely. What are the particularities of an ordinary within which we can experience - or that connects to - our freedom? How to arrive at a permanent holiday within the everyday?
text by Aras Amiri
https://vimeo.com/725626913
‘INFRASTRUCTURE IS?’
London, St. James Church Goldsmith,
March 2022
‘INFRASTRUCTURE IS?’‘A Receipt for Salary’ is an installation that explores the process of calculation of salary, to see how its infratructure reprouces gender and social inequality. Focusing on the gender pay gap, by deconstructing the factors that create the remuneration, how skill is measured and what are the parameters that generate the remuneration and payment.
Using the equal pay act and the court case between Asda shop workers and distributors, I have tried to visualize the salary infrastructure and its old, patriarchal biases.
Untouched / 2016
This project has been performed with a rolling scanner, in order to recreate the similar sense of touch. Applying the scanner on one surface for documenting reminds me of this intimate, undesired and sometimes shocking contacts with unknown and random persons.
Setting the pieces of my skin scans against the car seat background texture, hovers between aggression and anxiety on the one hand and a sense of repression and complicity on the other hand. I chose car seat textures as background of the image as it is the representation of taxi and public transport as a main location for these encounters and also the pattern implies the sense of strain.