Amin Davaie
And after all we are just ordinary people ):
2010

Photo Installation
And after all we are just ordinary people ):

16-21, July 2010 | Mohsen Gallery  | Tehran

 



 

The past year (2009) was populated by deadly events that happened to us continuously without disruption. The burden of agony was manifestly reflected visually, normatively and vocally in the artworks of this or that gallery in different parts of the city. The artist citizen accepted a heavy duty
in these events and paid a high price for it .

However, among the witnesses of the event, photography as a medium turned into an interactive real-time medium and connected the pictures
of the event to the most wide-spread media of mass communication .

Today, confronted with Amin Davaie’s work, one feels a historical lump in throat and sees the eyes of a nation who dream while standing in front
of history accusing others .

Amin Davaie’s installation is made of thirty photo frames of eight inches in a 150 by 150cm square exhibited in a dark room. The multi-frame
technique has succeeded in creating something between photography and motion pictures. The light on portraits is from the right hand side.
The actors of this tragedy have been selected among citizens and young friends of the artists and put in front of the camera. The white and
bright background resembles personal photographs: as in documentary photography, they are standing in front of us without any mediation.

The media of photography has the potential and the valuable content of naked and sharp reality. This quality has an immediacy which ren-
ders the mortality of life. On the other hand, photographs are undeniable documents in the face of alteration of truth hidden in subjects. In
certain cases, it is a unique weapon against the oblivion and denial of formal media. In this cycle of value and anti-value, a representation
of the challenge between life and death is exhibited.

This is a movie-like artwork in which certain frames have moved out of the orbit of regular movement. Or from a different viewpoint, they
are images which through juxtaposition have turned into slowly moving motion pictures whose different aspects and hidden meanings we
comprehend by conceptual layering.

First of all, the installation implies that this group can represent the agents of protesting.
Secondly, the portraits constitute the common patterns of our society, and in a certain respect, they are the actors of a reality happening
not in society but in the artist’s studio. They appear metaphorical.

Thirdly, by confronting us the group calls to judgment the collective consciousness of the beholder. In a minimalistic way, the work is comprised of LCDs in a designed dark space with a double meaning. The first meaning is that it surrounds the audience and the second, it recounts of an event in the insecure nights of a long wait of a prisoner illustrating his loneliness and fear of being lost in the dusts of time
The images are accompanied with a heavy musical noise that like a medium fills the temporal gaps of the work and reconstructs vague and
derogatory images happening to us. The musical text resembles the harsh sound of a cold metal scrubbed on audience’s nerves and rever-
berates passing through the swollen eyes of the performers in the empty space of the event. Their strange faces, in times tired, in times
tortured, aggressive, innocent, surprised or metamorphosed, narrates:
In front of them, we stare at the visage of history .
ziaï / July 2010