SHIRIN SABAHI WINS MOPCAP 2011
Magic of Persia's Contemporary Art Prize for 2011 has been awarded to Shirin Sabahi, who currently lives and works in Sweden. Watch her piece, Swede Home here. More information at shirinsabai.com.
Shirin Sabahi's Artist Statement:
My work addresses the materiality of time by exploring the representations of the past in the present moment fabricated in circulating photographic and filmic images. In my image and text-based projects, I employ both narrative fiction and documentary approaches and I investigate competing interpretations and identifications encouraged by language and image. Since 2008, I have worked with the personal archive of a middle-class Swedish family which includes almost 60 reels of 8-mm films shot by Ellis Edman [1899-1988] and his son Jan Edman [1928] between 1935 and 1988. Each chapter in this body of work deals with related concepts, emerging from history and memory, and finds its way from and into my objet trouvé–the Edman archive. In Present Perfect Tense, I reconstruct Ellis’s life, his interest in filmmaking and his career as a journalist during the World War II. In Swede Home, I work with Jan’s films and his memory as a visiting engineer working in Iran during the ‘60s and the ‘70s. In Untitled [District Sixteen] I revisit one of the sites that Edman was working on during his time in Iran. In the installation of the two latter works together, the audience can choose between two narrations: one is by Edman himself giving a commentary on his films some thirty years later; the other is by a photographer whom upon visiting the site of the former Tehran slaughterhouse – which Edman’s company was involved in its construction – unfolds the history of the piece of land that the slaughterhouse was once located on. It follows the closure of the slaughterhouse in the early ‘80s, its transformation to a cultural house in the early ‘90s and a target of the systemized land grab in Tehran of the millennium. While the cameraman’s commentary addresses the longing for past and the arbitrariness of memory, the photographer’s narration employs the location of the slaughterhouse as the space of the transference of her non-lived past. Accompanied by a slide show of the site’s current condition, past and present, real and fictive come together and this charged space becomes the face of the continuous reconfiguration of national identity. Dealing with identity as such, Geography Test for People in Pictures playfully invites the audience to measure their knowledge of Tehran. It formulates a diverse reading of urban life in this city, exploring both the national intensities and the homogeneous look as an inevitable part of international capital.
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MOP CAP is a global search to identify the most talented emerging Iranian artists and provide an international platform for their careers. Selected from over 100 nominees, the Finalists were chosen from a shortlist of 25 who were exhibited at Traffic, Dubai during March 2011. The winner was selected by a revered judging panel whose members include leading figures from the Iranian and International art scenes.