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I curse this bloodless world.
I curse the silence
and am silent.
Greek Mythology – the ethereal fluid, not blood, supposed to flow in the veins of the gods.
Pathology – a watery, acrid discharge from certain wounds and sores.
The different interpretations produced over time shape the terrain of this research and the dialogue between the curator and the artists in this project.
Myth deals with the ambiguities of individual and collective experiences of human life and makes perplexed phenomenon tolerable through narration. For this reason, we seek haven in mythology to confront life’s bewilderment or to find resilience with no expectation to find the answer to the obscurity that history brings us.
The tragic story of Daedalus and Icarus has been interpreted in many ways in different cultures through different times: the ascension of human to the spiritual realm, uniting with the divine and being flared by the sun of truth, the consequence of ambition, and even the fall of man. Our intension is not to carry on with the same narrative. Icarus pushed himself to the boundaries trying to achieve the impossible as a modern activist. There has always been a barrier separating mortal beings and powerful gods. Despite such discrimination between Superior gods and inferior beings, we still hear voices from this class that rise against the gods. Regardless of such hierarchy, the battle between the society and the power structure is happening in a different way today.
The act of flying was something only gods and superior creatures ruling the sky were able to conquer. The decision to go beyond the limitations of the human race and the hope for flying high was what provoked gods to descent he who set out on a journey to such hierarchy. In recent years the spectators of a fall reach out for the truth through a more accessible path by the mass media, yet this revelation relentlessly projects them an Icarian fall. Punishment, mourning, amnesia, remembrance, toleration, hopelessness, and desolation are all the ladder of a fall that surround societies extensively.
There is a tie between the hero who decides to fly high, and the spectators who fly in the middle. The society who witness the fall of the hero are participants to the same fall- if not turning their faces away. If they stand still witnessing the incident, even though they survive the fall, they still break. The punishment of the spectators who avoided a fall, is to watch the hero’s fall. This collective trauma potentially recollects a sealed history. It is a history that belongs to the whole humankind, and yet powerful gods appropriate it throughout history.
No matter how mild or severe the incident, we have to keep the memory of those we watched fall alive, because the moment the witnesses’ narration starts to disappear, the history changes it to the benefit of the new narrators.
Yasaman Tamizkar
Curator
Orpiment is a chemical that is used for medical purposes as well as in the cosmetic industry. In a way it is considered to be a killer cure! From one hand it can cure and from the other can kill, since it is poisonous. It could cause the user to create an imaginary world of love and beauty and serenity, which does not exist in reality. Therefore, it could affect one’s pshychic ability which could cause death instead of happiness.
Morality and principals are achieved in a point in time. That point in time is impregnated by circumstances. Variables such as population, geography, government, history, and tradition in certain swings translates into human behaviour, principal or its costumes. Such sway makes a circle in which the masses of people encompassed and affected. The layers of history are built this way, revolutions, uprisings, movements, sufferings and joys, are all built by this sway.
suffering and sorrow coexists along with a combination of moral codes of a society, clan. (Sorrow has a geographic component in it too) Hence the Pain differs from east to west. The easterner suffers from pains the westerner might not have a clue from. Here in the east the size and density of the population and excess of traditions as well as abundance, has made solid walls for the ivy of pain. That pain can be the pain of colonialism or the pain of ignorance. The pain exists and its raison d’être exists too. Porse…
It was here in Bangladesh that I get a chance to ponder upon the history and memories of the liberating movements. But liberating from what? Because we should know that there is a significant difference between the pain that others impose on people and the pain people are used to endure in their lives. That pain was different from the pain of a disabled man with his bare feet and long skinny hands on the hot asphalt. It is different from the pain the gaunt legs of an older man paddling on a rickshaw. Colonialization is putting up with a pain of unfamiliar hence it bears conflict.
I found ordinary people, waiting for CNG among them the poor, the middle class, Hindu, Muslim, traveler, etc and I photographed them. Hoping to capture that pain that was sometimes apparent and some other times not, in their faces. That living struggle with pain became the essence I wanted to capture in my photographs.
For the second section of the book I used images of skeletons instead to hint on the instability and unreliability of the situation. These skeletons sometimes were able to show emotions through facial mussels, that emotion being suffering or a huge smile but they got slaughtered during the years of 1960-70. The leaves are reminders of freedom fighters and martyrs who were among the people of the country and now are only memories that are only reminded in speachs.
When the ruler Pontius Pilates who ordered the torture and crucifixion of Christ that after a crown of thorns on his head showed him to the raging audience and said: ECCO HOMO or as Friedrich Nietzsche puts it a human too human who might be the metaphor for displaying his calm and painless face where as he has been going through a lot of suffering.
victim playing are create through the history and theyformed by historical experience andreligion and traditions. There are signs of victim playing in face of every religion and ideology which irrigated by blood of martyrs. But sometimes this way of behaving turns to a way of living. So victim playing is not naïve behavior. All of us have a victim player in our pocketto take it out in times of trouble. Whenthe victim player face a situation andother acts seems useless, it starts to moan and showing its hatred. Or sometimes it exaggerate about life difficulty and then self-mutilation comesout as the last effort of a victim player.Professional victim players are those who use this act to escape from ordinary responsibilities and also as areasoning for their own faults.
Victim player takes a free ride with its hatred behavior. If victim playing isn’t amalevolent tree, surly it’s a none-turnway
Decline is a negation, the negation of the steadiness and staying.
To distance from the status quo. It is to turn from one sate to another and churn and destroys whatever is which does not tolerate the current situation. It is the physics of transformation; transformation from one kind to another, from one form to another or from one life to another. It is temporality itself. It is rebellious and anarchist and anti-history and memory, and it exist in actions and thoughts. It is Janus , the mythical god of the beginning and the end of a mirror installed in front of anther mirror. To become is to be oneself from another route, which means being twice. With little consciousness to the time, which pushed, back the time that has a limited tendency of the retuning urge. It is the source of creativity.Hence all creativities are but the explosion of actions and reactions,the junction of powers. It is a black whole that it’s gravity attracts other gravities, anti-history and memory too…
The Chapter, To Become, is the first chapter of the Decline collection. It stares at the antennas as well as the mysterious fungus and irregularities on fruits and grains and foods and hyphae on bread.
It sees the Mold and moisture sits as well as corruption and smell the death form the lint of fruits. As long as whether is agreeable and there is some air, the salty and sweet microorganisms will have a slimy and colorful surface. It is sour and bitter and smelly and can make us sick. I have farmed most of them to have a chance to observe them. In some of the images they might look a bit abstract, yet they are big pieces of the routine bread and yogurt. Here I have taken the air
from them and have kept them under a transparent gelatin surface, for you to capture a second of their tendency ‘to become’ and ‘to change’. They touch and reach toward you and your belongings everyday and every second. It is your turn to touch them back.
In Roman mythology, Janus or Ianus, is the god of gates, doors, passageways and entry routes, and also the god of beginnings and endings. Janus the most outstanding heritage remaining form Janus in modern culture, is January that is the first month of the year. The significance for this name is that each year begins and ends with this month. Janus is often portrayed with two faces or two heads. One of those two heads looks toward the front and one in the opposite direction, which means it looks behind.
Iran’s contemporary history after the Constitutional Revolutions is inundated with instances of people revolting and governments suppressing. Five historical junctions among these have left a permanent mark on the body of our history: June 22, 1899, February 22, 1921, April 1949, August 19, 1953, and 2009
In the early days of the Revolution the streets were pulsating with an excitement that ended in shedding a lot of blood and killing many a body. The image of this man was recovered from slides in a newspaper archive. A narrative of those days, those streets, and blood …
Kurds are the people who speak Kurdish and they widely live in the Central Asia, Middle East and the west of Iranian plateau and the east of Anatoly. Although the Kurdistan region had been a part of Iran and culturally, historically and linguistically belongs to Iranian people, after the battle of Chaldiran which culminated in 1514, it marked the start of the Ottoman-Persian Wars between the Iranian Safavids (and successive Iranian dynasties) and the Ottomans. For the next 300 years, many of the Kurds found themselves living in territories that were frequently exchanged between Ottoman Turkey and Iran during the protracted series of Ottoman-Persian Wars. Nowadays the great Kurdistan forms parts of northwest of Iran, east of Iraq, north of Syria and also a big part of east Turkey. They are the biggest of the ethnic minority in Turkey and one of the largest ethnic groups in Iran too. Thus throughout their chaotic history, courage, resistance and stories of frustrations to the way of liberation can be found. Kurds are often regarded as “the largest ethnic group without a state in the world as well.
Man does not kill but himself as he has never seen anything outside himself.