we and We, 2003
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Picture Montage 125 x 123 cm -
Picture Montage 125 x 123 cm
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mirrored text, 16 pieces -
each 31,25 x 30,75 cm -
31,25 x 30,75 cm
Dress, chador, glass frame,
screen printed, cut into pieces, stitched
Exhibition: Kunstverein Vreden, 2004
screen printed, cut into pieces, stitched
Exhibition: Kunstverein Vreden, 2004
we and We
Farideh Jamshidi's photographic installation, 'we and We', consists of three separate panels. Two large, square-format photographs hang beside each other, opposite hangs a similar sized panel with a text in Persian from Farideh Jamshidi. The viewer enters the room between the panels.
The photographs are digitally mounted and with a complex internal mirrored structure. This complex structure arises not only virtually from the ordering of the image, but also through the actual space of the motive. The pictorial space in general presents as the structural surface of the image content a wall-sized mirror with an ornamental frame. The room reflected in the mirror recalls the rooms of the Baroque gentry with attributes such as marble, crystal chandeliers and appropriate furnishings.
The two women in each photograph show the artist herself, in different clothing and attitudes. One of the female figures wears a chador (cloth). Head and body are enclosed, with the exception of the face, with a dark material. The word, chador, is persian and means something like 'tent'. The chador is specifically Iranian and its history clearly illustrates how a dress rule can reflect the implementation, exercise and control of power. Whereas in the mid-twenties the chador was strongly forbidden under the Pahlawi Dynasty, after the Iranian Revolution at the end of the seventies it became compulsory for all woman, including non-muslims. The chador could leave only the face and the hands free. The other figure in the photograph, in contrast, wears an off-the-shoulder, white dress. Her softly curling hair flows over her bare shoulders and arms.
From this mirroring construction the viewer recognises that the dark, veiled person is, so to say, real in the space on the other side of the picture frame, and represents in the pictures themselves a reflection, simultaneously opposite and behind, of the person in white. In addition, the text panel in the installation establishes - in contrast to the western norm - a direction of reading from right to left. The picture aesthetic, through its use of 'half-close-up' modus, appears to have more to do with the dramaturgy of cinematic film than with that borrowed from fashion photography. Nevertheless, the elegance of the presentation as well as echoes in the pictorial language evoke the world of fashion.
The hands play a leading role in the serial connections between the two pictures, as the contents of the pictures coincide down to the smallest detail. In panel 'two' a hand comes out from under the chador covering and refers directly, through the jewellery on the wrist, to the hand of the woman in the white dress.
The mirroring is both familiar and puzzling, for the same reality is recognised and yet, through the altered relationships, it becomes strange. In these large motifs – and also within occidental cultural traditions – the questioning is of the attempt to capture, and possibly in consequence, also to construct one's own identity. The conflicts are recognised, but not easy to unite. It is about the combination and experience of the processes of the perception of self and others. Static position and perceptually open development, reticence and openness, but also failures and successful dynamic processes are closely connected with this theme.
The iconographically schooled viewer will recognise fairly easily the richness of pictorial echoes in the installation of Farideh Jamshidi. Not as paraphrase, but rather as – taking into account the image construction – an open space for expansion, that is stabilised and extended by the meanings offered in the images.
The white figure – a reference to Botticelli's 'The Birth of Venus' – condenses moments in the discovery of self as woman. She is prototype and counter-image, archetypal, clearly social and utopian at the same time. Furthermore, Farideh Jamshidi achieves important moments of balance in the installation, 'we and We', through the conscious use of image process, known since Surrealism and in part, a transfer of the syntax and semiotics of dreams and the unconscious into the tools of the artist. Installative space, picture series and pictorial content, including text as code-like additional image, result in a spatial and aesthetic strategy and experimental area, that for a period of time leads and frames the vision and mind of involved viewers, a laboratory mechanism that functions rather like an 'articulated novelty machine' and leads the viewer to a new psychic reality. In this sense the process of self discovery here presented leads to a poetic intensification as we know it from Calderon and Grillparzer: 'The dream a life – life only a dream'
Josef Speigel / Heinz Kock
Farideh Jamshidi's photographic installation, 'we and We', consists of three separate panels. Two large, square-format photographs hang beside each other, opposite hangs a similar sized panel with a text in Persian from Farideh Jamshidi. The viewer enters the room between the panels.
The photographs are digitally mounted and with a complex internal mirrored structure. This complex structure arises not only virtually from the ordering of the image, but also through the actual space of the motive. The pictorial space in general presents as the structural surface of the image content a wall-sized mirror with an ornamental frame. The room reflected in the mirror recalls the rooms of the Baroque gentry with attributes such as marble, crystal chandeliers and appropriate furnishings.
The two women in each photograph show the artist herself, in different clothing and attitudes. One of the female figures wears a chador (cloth). Head and body are enclosed, with the exception of the face, with a dark material. The word, chador, is persian and means something like 'tent'. The chador is specifically Iranian and its history clearly illustrates how a dress rule can reflect the implementation, exercise and control of power. Whereas in the mid-twenties the chador was strongly forbidden under the Pahlawi Dynasty, after the Iranian Revolution at the end of the seventies it became compulsory for all woman, including non-muslims. The chador could leave only the face and the hands free. The other figure in the photograph, in contrast, wears an off-the-shoulder, white dress. Her softly curling hair flows over her bare shoulders and arms.
From this mirroring construction the viewer recognises that the dark, veiled person is, so to say, real in the space on the other side of the picture frame, and represents in the pictures themselves a reflection, simultaneously opposite and behind, of the person in white. In addition, the text panel in the installation establishes - in contrast to the western norm - a direction of reading from right to left. The picture aesthetic, through its use of 'half-close-up' modus, appears to have more to do with the dramaturgy of cinematic film than with that borrowed from fashion photography. Nevertheless, the elegance of the presentation as well as echoes in the pictorial language evoke the world of fashion.
The hands play a leading role in the serial connections between the two pictures, as the contents of the pictures coincide down to the smallest detail. In panel 'two' a hand comes out from under the chador covering and refers directly, through the jewellery on the wrist, to the hand of the woman in the white dress.
The mirroring is both familiar and puzzling, for the same reality is recognised and yet, through the altered relationships, it becomes strange. In these large motifs – and also within occidental cultural traditions – the questioning is of the attempt to capture, and possibly in consequence, also to construct one's own identity. The conflicts are recognised, but not easy to unite. It is about the combination and experience of the processes of the perception of self and others. Static position and perceptually open development, reticence and openness, but also failures and successful dynamic processes are closely connected with this theme.
The iconographically schooled viewer will recognise fairly easily the richness of pictorial echoes in the installation of Farideh Jamshidi. Not as paraphrase, but rather as – taking into account the image construction – an open space for expansion, that is stabilised and extended by the meanings offered in the images.
The white figure – a reference to Botticelli's 'The Birth of Venus' – condenses moments in the discovery of self as woman. She is prototype and counter-image, archetypal, clearly social and utopian at the same time. Furthermore, Farideh Jamshidi achieves important moments of balance in the installation, 'we and We', through the conscious use of image process, known since Surrealism and in part, a transfer of the syntax and semiotics of dreams and the unconscious into the tools of the artist. Installative space, picture series and pictorial content, including text as code-like additional image, result in a spatial and aesthetic strategy and experimental area, that for a period of time leads and frames the vision and mind of involved viewers, a laboratory mechanism that functions rather like an 'articulated novelty machine' and leads the viewer to a new psychic reality. In this sense the process of self discovery here presented leads to a poetic intensification as we know it from Calderon and Grillparzer: 'The dream a life – life only a dream'
Josef Speigel / Heinz Kock