Art: Icons, Shoja Azari
May 13, 2010 Back to News
To find the Shah, start dead center. Shift the gaze a foot and a half to the left, now eight inches down. There he is, a small framed black-and-white photo, licked by neverending flames. This is the still point of Coffee House Painting, centerpiece of Icons, an exhibition of the work of Shoja Azari on view at New York's Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery through May 27.
Coffee House Painting is a video collage of unusual and innovative form. An image of a painting in the genre -- Mohammad Modabber's The Day of the Last Judgment (1897) -- is projected onto a large canvas, approximately eight feet wide and four-and-a-half tall. Within this giant projection, with its myriad scenes of paradise and perdition, are projected small images of violent acts, their preludes, and their epilogues, from the past four decades of Middle Eastern history. Frozen amid the gold-and-ochre sprawl of the Modabber, the 20-odd video miniatures come to life by turns.
Hezbollah forces march. American rocket launchers fire. Palestinians wielding stones confront Israeli bulldozers. An election protestor is killed on the streets of Tehran. Most of these small videos have an audio component, in some cases verbal. A masked suicide bomber recites his final testament. Hassan Nasrallah delivers a fervent peroration. Lynndie England explains that the soldiers at Abu Ghraib just did as they were told. The reverberation between the different levels of scale is dazzling: The import of each video is vastly disproportionate to its tiny size, little changed from their primary source, YouTube. The scalar play redoubles with the vivid impact of each clip versus the vast hush of the Last Judgment.
In a structural irony that underscores the sophistication of the work, it is due to the very fact that the image of the Shah never freezes, that the flames are constantly in motion, that it is experienced as a point of stillness. The face of the dictator is situated just a few inches from the concealed one of Muhammad, one of several images of the Prophet that appear in Modabber's painting. The original now resides in Tehran's Reza Abbasi Museum, but here it is given new life, its original function as a basis for edifying narration in an informal setting restored and brought grippingly up to date.
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Coffee House Painting is a video collage of unusual and innovative form. An image of a painting in the genre -- Mohammad Modabber's The Day of the Last Judgment (1897) -- is projected onto a large canvas, approximately eight feet wide and four-and-a-half tall. Within this giant projection, with its myriad scenes of paradise and perdition, are projected small images of violent acts, their preludes, and their epilogues, from the past four decades of Middle Eastern history. Frozen amid the gold-and-ochre sprawl of the Modabber, the 20-odd video miniatures come to life by turns.
Hezbollah forces march. American rocket launchers fire. Palestinians wielding stones confront Israeli bulldozers. An election protestor is killed on the streets of Tehran. Most of these small videos have an audio component, in some cases verbal. A masked suicide bomber recites his final testament. Hassan Nasrallah delivers a fervent peroration. Lynndie England explains that the soldiers at Abu Ghraib just did as they were told. The reverberation between the different levels of scale is dazzling: The import of each video is vastly disproportionate to its tiny size, little changed from their primary source, YouTube. The scalar play redoubles with the vivid impact of each clip versus the vast hush of the Last Judgment.
In a structural irony that underscores the sophistication of the work, it is due to the very fact that the image of the Shah never freezes, that the flames are constantly in motion, that it is experienced as a point of stillness. The face of the dictator is situated just a few inches from the concealed one of Muhammad, one of several images of the Prophet that appear in Modabber's painting. The original now resides in Tehran's Reza Abbasi Museum, but here it is given new life, its original function as a basis for edifying narration in an informal setting restored and brought grippingly up to date.
Click Here to Read More
