Anti-home

|Project funded by Apexart NYC Curated by Elnaz Tehrani+Anahita Razbollah
as a part of the WOMEN C(A)REATE project. Tehran | Iran | Darbast Mohsen Gallery

“Home is home, and everything else is not home.” 

Nostalgia is an effective reaction to separation from intimacy, linked in its pathological forms to melancholia. Persistent reflections about home, isolation, insomnia, inertia and suspense are all symptoms of a sentimental longing. The agony from nostalgia fantasized about home, leaves virtually no psychological space for fascination towards present events and circumstances. 

Following a relationship breakup (in the absence of intimacy which makes home), and having to move in to a new place, I obsessively wondered if I am to recreate a home, how would I fill in the blanks between remembering and forgetting, continuity and rupture, or sameness and difference. It would be only practicable once the linear view of time is warped (given that the past is forever gone and the future entirely unpredictable). Hence, the past in some way must become available in symbolic representation (through images, objects, association, etc.)

downloading snap-shots from a video of the new living space, and physically (in print forms) uploading them on an imagined place was an effort that initiated my installation “Anti-home”. The video of an extensive sequence shot by a smartphone circuiting through local/personal living areas, is being displayed in a focal tv set. The song lyrics of the Sorry by Elton John subtitles the video.

A blurred screen-shot of the chandelier while the camera is looking up placed in an old frame is horizontally hanging from the high ceilings of the exhibition site. The image of the sofa diverged and then printed on cushions are now put on the designated couch. Same goes with the undone beddings and the half-closed shower curtains. A hung giant jacket is sewn from a fabric printed with the image of a closet space drawn again from the main video media. The silhouette footage of my presence in the video are masked and blanked, As they are extracted and then independently video-projected in a dark corner of the installation.