Anahita Razmi, 2004–2020
Germany, England, Iran. 55 min
In EnglishSUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 – 7:30 PM
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Anahita Razmi is a video and performance artist based between Berlin, Germany, and London UK. Her films generate cognitive dissonance and question mainstream assumptions about culture, identity, and spirituality. Razmi uses tropes, the collective unconscious, and objects of national and cultural importance in a rather tongue-in-cheek way to elicit laughter and insight. In these films, she removes the traditional meaning of cultural symbols and instead employs new ideas, contexts, and situations onto them. This video series provides an overview of her works from the last two decades which have been shown across the world at galleries and institutions such as: Carbon 12, Dubai, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Museo Jumex, Mexico, The National Art Center, Tokyo, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany.
This program of shorts by Anahita Razmi will feature the following pieces from 2004 to 2020, spanning the last twenty years of her career:
- How your Veil can help you in the Case of an Earthquake (Lesson 1-8) is a video about a big earthquake in the region of Bam, Iran in December 2003. In the video, the Islamic veil – in this case, a “chador” – is used as a functional object. Shot in high contrast black and white, the video shows a rigorous instruction in eight steps on how to use your veil as a lifesaver in the case of an earthquake: a dry run, that is reminiscent of stewardess instructions.
- AAAAAAAAAAAH merges a selection of different audio “AAAAAAAAAH”-extracts taken from pop songs and Islamic “azans” (call to prayer).
- Here Scripts dives into representational values, equations and statements are dropped into uncertainty: as a video mashup, the work is juggling with notions of place and context, onsite vs offsite, narration vs construction, here vs elsewhere.
- Scroll stock, pluck stock, click stock, drum stock, tap stock, rattle stock focuses on hand movements and technological devices, composing a choreography using online stock footage videos of scrolling hands and fingers.
- White Wall Tehran is a very short video shot In January 2007 where Ramzi was stopped by the Iranian revolution guard on the streets in Tehran, because she had apparently been filming them with her video camera. They took her in and erased 27 seconds of her video by filming the white inner wall of their headquarters. The erasure is now the production of the artwork.
- PARTIES uses black-and-white versions of logos and banners belonging to past and current Iranian political parties and groups, set to a snapping/clapping beat.
- Middle East Coast West Coast is re-enacting the video “East Coast West Coast” (1969) by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. In the original video, Holt and Smithson improvise a conversation based on stereotypical and opposing positions of US East Coast and West Coast lifestyle, art, and artists. Holt assumes the role of an intellectual, conceptual artist from New York, while Smithson plays the laid-back Californian driven by feelings and instinct.