Nooshin Farhid’s videos are dystopian hallucinations. Resisting narrative, they take the viewer immediately into a world which is simultaneously familiar and uncanny. They are fragmentary, dreamlike, beyond easy interpretation. They have the incomprehensible logic of an unknown language. Like the great modernist photo-collagists Kurt Schwitters, John Heartfield but above all Hannah Hoch, Farhid uses found film footage which she combines with her own material to construct, or ‘reconstruct’, as the artist puts it, cinematic space. She edits out the normal boundaries of narrative, to create new dimensions, levels of meaning, connections and combinations, with (sometimes dark) humour and calm, detached decorum. Farhid has developed a finely tuned awareness of the inherent strangeness of the medium of film itself, when it is released from the support of narrative and meaning.

Farhid arrived in London as a political refugee from Iran, a violent transition in which she lost and then had to rebuild language, identity and culture in alien surroundings. The sense of marginalisation and strangeness, a lack of a specific social position, a highly sensitive political awareness, so strongly felt in her work, is based directly on her own experience.

Farhid’s work as a collagist – using her own film as well as found material – stays close to the directly human element in film, the element of the human ‘trace’ that film shares with photography.. She blends the various languages of film, such as cartoons, the documentary, the interview, cinema verité, reality TV, to produce non-sense that has lost its usual infrastructure of meaning. Found footage blends invisibly with her own film. Sound and colour are central: layers of sound, carefully edited, claim our attention or throb unconsciously in the background; colour, sharply defining mood, sometimes abstract, lush and lyrical, sometimes as bland as a tired surveillance video in a grocery shop.

In Criss Cross, 2009, several thematic strands are simultaneously developed and subverted through the 7 minute 30 second film, a relatively short work for the artist. They are woven together in a way that subtly seduces the viewer - there must be a narrative here for me, even if it is based on my own projections onto this material - while at the same time, claiming the ultimate meaning for the artist alone.

Criss Cross begins with a shot of a parked car at night, filmed through a strong red filter, reverberating with the sound of crickets singing (under which you can just hear heavy breathing). With a few quick cinematic tropes we are pulled instantly into a dizzying sequence of material. Who is the person quickly leaving the car, who are the men moving round the room to the sound of a tolling bell? An interior space, a car space, seems to be opened up in the narrative, possibly, but never explicitly, as a male ‘frame’ for the giggling, sexualized, girlish female voice/presence. Prostitution, sex industry? Farhid throws us into a powerfully emotional, closed, night time world.
The dry red heat of the opening sequence is quickly threatened by thunder and then heavy rain. Quickly the rain becomes a torrential flood, cars sink below the water surface, people drown, or cling to safety in the deluge. The helicopter, present throughout the film, transforms from surveillance to rescue vehicle. We have moved from paranoia to panic. A final moment reveals the female presence dissolving, sinking, somehow, also into blackness. End. Criss Cross is ‘reconstructed’ from BBC News, Paramedics, Sky Cops, Tornados, Maciityre's Big Sting, Volcano, Red Light Lounge.

Farhid is a restless collector in an age of information excess. But to ‘collect’ suggests power, previous knowledge, expertise. Instead the artist’s eye is informed by marginalization rather than any system of knowledge based on control or order. She induces, rather than deduces, knowledge. Her practice is to work towards, to quote Maria Fusco, creating or tracing a broader, possibly more fertile environment through close looking, rather than tracking a logical conclusion from the clues given(2).

Farhid’s marginality as an active spectator in another culture informs everything she does. A highly sensitive political sensibility informs her new work, Conic Trilogy, 2010. Surveillance, policing and subversion are also integrated into earlier pieces. Freed of the usual constraints of class and social identification, she moves freely across British society in a way that could be much more problematic for a national. Her work is set on the margins of that society: in abandoned military installations, in subcultures, groups and communities that are outside the mainstream, at night, in areas outside the boundaries of bourgeois social order.

The liminal space, for Farhid, is one where the material she finds and the filming she does herself, are saturated with an intense, but non-specific atmosphere. The finished work, transformed by the editing process, is never overtly critical. The artist makes a new non narrative with a powerful but latent message, where the behaviorist ‘triggers’ of emotion generate a new kind of experience for the viewer. Each piece, and all her work taken as a whole, consists of rhizomatic (3) fragments connecting dynamically, meshing, transforming and overlaying each other.

A new space, and therefore a new political possibility. The culture itself, she feels, is on the point of some fundamental change. She is an astute witness, an active spectator.

Extract from: Inscription and Transcription: Some notes on the Liminal
Peter Cross
ART TOMORROW
March 2011

Single Dark Space

It is often asserted that cinema is the most powerful art form of the last two centuries, cinema initially was seen as a reflection of life but in more recent times life has become a reflection of cinema. Cinema with its power to entertain, drawing together large groups of people in a single dark space, with its power to influence and create a multitude of images and emotions. As such this art form also becomes a source for propaganda, for the promotion of ideological positions and as a site of our collective anxieties, at the same time it establishes a space for our individual projected fantasies, our identification with characters, constructed identities and narrative scenarios. Hollywood as one of the most globally powerful image industries is also one of the most controlling and fascistic in its promotion of ideas, morals and political values. It remains as an industry tightly regulated and censored (by an anonymous committee) driven by profit and as such severely limited with the scope of its subject matter, its use of familiar narratives and correspondingly its inability to critically address important crucial concerns in a climate of gradually changing power balances. Yet cinema in its illusory state of being able to present us with a reality, its ability to visually assault us irrespective of our different language systems is a
powerful force for change.

Nooshin Farhid’s work locks onto this sense of the cinematic in her appropriation of the intense ‘visuality’ of cinematic constructions, in doing so she consciously exploits our recognition of visual strategies and narrative scenarios each of which triggers our memory banks into a false sense of security. As the viewer we are placed in a position of control for what appears to be a familiar plot line allows us to be passive receivers, undisturbed and settled within the limits of our experience. However with Farhid’s videos this is very short lived, our complacency is comprehensively challenged, we are jolted out of this state of comfortability. The tactic is one of
disruption whereby we enter into a kind of game, one of the recognisable and the unrecognisable as we find ourselves on varying levels of spatial and psychological narrative awareness. Elements are derived from different unrelated sources; in recent pieces we come across documentary footage as dispersed as political events, scientific and medical material to the tracking of hurricanes and other natural disasters. Added to which is the use of found and original animation and real time material shot under direction and on location. In historical terms there is a referencing of collage, Hannah Hoch and Kurt Schwitters and in relation to film the work of Andrej Tarkovsky though this is not directly evident, Farhid does not pay any kind of homage to them, her approach is more genealogical than historically linear. There is though the same radical uncompromising approach in that what we are forced to takeon board is our own fragmented experience one which is not ordered and regimented but in which our state of consciousness flits and darts as it receives and processes stimuli and information. It is as if these video works operate between the reception point and the rationalisation point in our brains, the space between the raw and the filtered.

Appropriation, eclectic and low tech would seem to be keywords in understanding the platform from which Farhid’s work operates, this sometimes brutal acquisition of different generic material in its process refuses to acknowledge any hierarchy of high art/low art evaluation but sees all visual material as being potentially useful and exploitable. Strategically this implies a resistance to working within established genres or adhering to known modes of time based practice at a time of conservatism within contemporary art and consequently a lack of serious critical engagement.

Such is the current situation that the political voice is simply one of a familiar rhetoric akin to red top journalism, apparently unwilling to address more wider critical concerns. This in some ways relates to Theodore Adorno’s comment on the capitalist system as being one which maintains its power by continually deflecting our focus away from the important and towards the comparatively trivial. Farhid in fact does the reverse her often humorous and playful images, her delight in bringing together a wide range of image types makes initially for an experience of visual pleasure which touches on the sensuously sublime as we jump cut from image to image, but this is purely a vehicle for alienating us from our habitual reception of mainstream media imagery, for threading its way through is a more disturbing and disruptive set of concerns that explore the fragility of the human psyche within a system that seeks to portray the individual as robotic and target led. Similarly in recent works less directly involved with the human subject as individual being as in ‘Signals’ and ‘End Zone’ images of celebration and inclement weather conditions become metaphors for pending social and political change. The more that western democracies desperately strive to restrict change the more that eastern societies accept change as a
prerequisite.

MERZ=M4 disjecta
Olivia Usher
March 2007

Encountering the work of Nooshin Farhid

The early work of Nooshin Farhid, took the form of a series of short videos featuring her parents, often these were ‘fly on the wall’ style pieces that recorded the everyday exchanges between the couple. These works involved acts of journeying , her parents passing through London on their way to a new life in Canada, daily routines, the making of tea, and anecdotal stories; her father tells familiar Iranian tales but with a twist. Whilst these early videos were never exploitative, in their ordinariness and everydayness there was a distinct edge, a sharpness of perception that undercut the façade of adopted identities and learnt social behaviours. Often very humorous and witty, a strategy Farhid uses to great effect in her later works, at the same time as this playfulness releases the underlying anxieties, trepidations and uncertainties that are more apart of private contemplation rather than public declarations.

These themes are further explored in a major work of 2002,’Sorry Mr Bond is Dead’ a brilliant title that in its ‘jokiness’ seems to make comment on imperialism, power and the demasculation of maleness. Farhid presents us with a number of linked sequences like a collection of short visual narratives, whilst they are in no particular logical order they are all located around a central subject; two men, friends, who are engaged in conversation over a glass or two of wine. Here, however she employs a new element in her practice the linearity of the early work is overtaken by the fragmented jump cut, the smoothness of narrative continuity is disrupted by a string of short interruptions, lines of flight that exploit the exchanges between the two friends. As their conversation develops so there emerges the familiarity of male competitiveness – sexual ambitions and fantasies, relationship issues, the contemplation of suicide and the fragility of identity particularly that of their sexual identity.  Each man seeks to counter his friends’ exploits and desires with evermore dramatic and extreme thoughts. What is experienced throughout ‘Sorry Mr Bond is Dead’ is the extraordinary visual inventiveness at work which assaults the viewer, the use of the fragmented narrative operates as a kind of critical restlessness as images and narrative flows are interrupted and redirected  down a range of possible paths only to be deflected again. The video works on the level of a logic of sense rather than one of rationality and cold reason. Many of these narrative ‘redirections’ are determined through the interpretation of language and the shifting of meaning and understanding in the space of cultural difference.

Nooshin Farhid left Iran as a response to the changes that took place following the Islamic Revolution.  She came to Britain as a political refugee relinquishing the security of family and social position and speaking very little of the language of her newly adopted country. This situation, however difficult, has been the source and impetus of much of her work, but it avoids the pitfalls of exploiting any sense of loss or nostalgia or any direct criticism of the politics of Iran or more interestingly to focus on her cultural heritage, instead she has concentrated her concerns and interests around the existential notion of the present. Existential in the sense that whilst there are clear references and influences that can be attached to this work there is no sense of a historical baggage or the awareness of a continuity of image making that can be seen to form the concept of a cultural mainstream with its attendant subjects and aesthetic values. She either consciously or unconsciously avoids what for many artists is an important identifying support mechanism, there is much more at risk here as she takes on both politics in general and the politics of art in particular creating a unique voice that refuses to be fixed within defined boundaries and categories as established by the culture of art. Similarly the political in her work is not overt, it holds no allegiance to known political parties or ideologies but perhaps is more related to Gilles Deleuze’s call for a new kind of politics outside that of the state controlled; she does not for instance make political art but her work is made politically and this is an important differentiation from the historical idea of political art. What emerges is an oblique critical attack in which the viewer is unable to be passive in their engagement but is expected to have to ‘work’ at the process of looking whilst at the same time witnessing overwhelming visual imagery and a certain degree of humour which has the effect of luring the viewer into a false sense of security only to be jolted out of any notion of complacency. The radical element in this work is the exposure of the façade, a lifting of the surface skin of things to expose the vulnerable, the raw, that which is hidden from public view, not in the pursuit of some idea of truth or moral and ethical values but of our total fragility.

Farhid has built upon the groundbreaking work of ‘Sorry Mr Bond is Dead’ with a succession of important video works including ‘Out of Sight’ and ‘Blind Spot’. More recently ‘Hair Salon’ 2004, made during a residency at SPACE Studios London, ‘Mrs Hodges frequent use of air freshener’, 2005 and ‘Flash Point’ 2006. What distinguishes these works is a developing eclecticism and an interest in the use of different moving image genres which cross the boundaries between what might be deemed to be high and low art from TV reality shows, ‘soaps’, pornography and cartoons to documentary material depicting political events and human tragedies. There is a bringing together of unlikely and uncomfortable alliances and a corresponding ‘welding’ together of these disparate images that creates an edginess and an awkwardness of the banal and the serious and in turn produces the effect of making us rethink these assumed categories and our response to them. Conceptually this experience is constructed through the use of collage, itself historically a radical strategy, by the process of taking a visual image out of its context and setting it alongside another image from another context through this process of decontextualisation and then recontextualisation  new relationships and new possibilities are encountered. At the same time the viewer experiences a recognition and an unfamiliarity as specific ‘clips’ are recognised within their specific image genres and type, for example when Farhid uses a scene from a Bollywood movie yet this is seen followed by a documentary clip exploring social and domestic issues. This structuring process has the effect of disrupting our expectation as image categories are jostled out of their narrative context and the whole notion of image qualification comes into play.

Recently there has been a further expansion of her practice with the production of a piece titled ‘Acid Drops’ 2005 a video installation first installed at Keith Talent Gallery for the exhibition project ‘Use this kind of Sky’, it took the form of a nine monitor arrangement and a projection which in this presentation was located in another part of the gallery away from the monitors. The monitors were randomly placed though in close proximity to each other, they gave the appearance of having  ‘just arrived’ in the space, provisional and waiting to be ordered into the aesthetics of the gallery. In many ways this strategy of placement gives an important entry into the work, each monitor had its own video looped partial narrative, sequences of imagery, fragments of a larger narrative to which we have no access. As the viewer we are teased by these narrative fragments that offer us a story line that seems familiar having its references to mainstream cinema and the more interesting regular drama we see on a weekly basis on TV. However these narratives remain unresolved they become furtive glimpses of potentially dark happenings.

What holds this fragile structure together is the overwhelming nature of the imagery, each sequence shot in real time and carefully edited is set against the background of a fantasy space, a space of fun, pleasure, enjoyment and excess. Pleasureland, the funfair, the uniqueness of the English pier clinging on to the mainland but not quite part of it metaphorically becoming an other place were the extreme can be experienced and indulged in. A dominant feature of this is the power of colour, not the subtlety of ordered sophisticated design but that of the clashing and outrageous, a flooding of reds, yellows, purples, greens all vying for our attention. Drifting through this space appearing and disappearing from location to location from monitor to monitor is the image of a young man carrying a bundle of newspapers. He carries these disposable belongings close to his body, sometimes dropping them and anxiously gathering them readjusting their position again close to his body. There is the sense that in the space of the fantastical which verges on madness these conveyors of news, information about the world becomes his hold on sanity. The newspaper also becomes multi-functional, its columns of text offer stories from the local to the international from the serious to the frivolous, its material being becomes a protection against the cold, as a rolled up object it becomes a powerful weapon of resistance. The newspaper is emblematic of a kind of stability, it stands for something morally, politically, ethically yet it is disposable, it has a short term shelf life, its authority is for 24 hours to be superseded by more news by more opinions. One of the most powerful sequences in the installation depicts a bright pillar box red stairwell the camera placed precariously at the top on the edge of a guard rail, sheets of newspaper float down to the basement below, the poetic of the initial single sheet becomes a torrent of sheets showering down. The order and structured form of the newspaper as an organised entity, edited, designed to take us from the important through to the frivolous but linked by the ever present advertising, the lifeblood of the publication is summarily despatched into chaos and collapse, into dispersal and dis-order.

The radicality of Farhid’s work is revealed by this deliberate unwillingness to adhere to the continuity and lineage of concepts and models of aesthetics or the logic of historical succession. This comes perhaps from her background, in which for  her the experience of making art in Western Europe and her relations to the  history of art of the latter is one of awareness but with a certain sense of distance. This evident dislocation from a ‘mother’ culture has the effect of seeing the world from a different perspective released from any sense of a cultural belonging or any possibility of falling into the complacency of the comfort zone of language command but always being in the space of separateness from the dominant culture and its language system. Such a position whilst operating as a form of dislocation is not one of being on the outside but more importantly, not to say more critically, it establishes a position of antagonism from within.

unpublished
Paul Eachus
2006

The Impossibility of Communication: Nooshin Farhid

The impossibility of communication is UK based video artist Nooshin Farhid's forte. Born in Iran and residing in London following the country's Islamic Revolution, Farhid fast took to the role of spectator attempting to document and make sense of the absurdities and banality of everyday life, which can often result in frustration and impotence when provoked by non-reciprocal exchange. As an artist Farhid continues to explore the concept of breakdown in daily communication, depicting the inevitable slippages and stutters that can occur in ordinary scenarios when there is an explicit absence of a shared linguistic or cultural mother tongue.

Distinctive in her style Farhid deploys works that present a sense of anti-genealogy, possibly seen to be intentional on her part, resisting any point of origin or focus within any type of real set space or time. Instead she is seen to put forward a series of short-term narratives that function without a beginning or ending but possess an unusually clear middle creating a complex labyrinth of multiplicity, which is at once enticing as it is troublesome to measure and control. As a consequence, more than often Farhid's works force the viewer to face a degree of annoyance, with oneself, having lost control over what appears to be an everyday scene taken from the norm. At the same time these works challenge any pre-determined expectations regarding scenes from the mundane that audiences may bring with them, especially concerning the notion of video art as a two dimensional form of reality entertainment, a moving and talking painting, which is easy on the eye and mind alike. On the contrary, reality television it is not, what may appear to be images that resemble "real" events, recorded in real time, they are in fact really nothing more than resemblances of reality. What is important to understand is that these are in fact highly edited artworks that suggest a surreal mix of fantasy and realism. In her recent work Hair Salon 2004 and Blind Spot 2004 which were on display at SPACE Gallery Farhid continues to execute works that trouble the notion of control and surpasses any fixed estimations that may exist.

As the title suggests Hair Salon is a highly humorous piece that explores the notion of beauty and bodily fascination. Set in the hubbub of metropolitan Toronto's Iranian district the work appears to have a filmic quality, with its sharp high-resolution colours and immaculate editing. However, unlike the smooth linear narrative that film works offer, Farhid presents a series of disjointed, and deliberately hesitant narratives, which as Farhid herself points out "[...].disturb the smooth flow of continuity." Within this work the viewer follows the journey of beautification within the interior space of the salon contrasted by the architectural make up of the nearby streets that are satiated with rubbish and graffiti. This is seen to create a mesmerising experience shifting the viewer's attention from one image to another equally contradicting one. This series of transfers constantly keeps the viewer in a state of awe with the impulsive desire to measure everything in an epic with the eye. The aural dimension in the work is equally hypnotic with the introduction of a foreign language, Persian, both in the exchange of dialogue between the young woman and her stylist and the sound of the radio, which is playing Iranian pop music. This allows the audience to experience first hand the impossibility of coherence whereby one is denied access to the dominant mode of communication. Farhid is seen to toy with this idea and further introduces another layer of anxiety by strategically drowning the conversation and introducing the maddening sound and image of the television screen showing a break dancing competition, which is then interrupted with the sound of the girl frantically chewing gum. Within the Hair Salon there is this deep-seated sense of non-completion, which keeps in trend with Farhid's non-linear trend of constantly keeping her audience on their toes.

In contrast to the filmic form and light-hearted nature of Hair Salon, Blind Spot offers an extremely dense two-monitor piece of dark humour, introducing the parallel themes of surveillance and isolation alongside one another. The coupling of this work alongside Hair Salon is highly interesting, just as it is incongruous, creating a degree of unbalance between two opposing states of humour and anxiety in both the mind and memory of the audience. Within Blind Spot a sense angst is extremely evident, from the very start, as on one monitor a lone security guard sits within his cabin keeping surveillance over four monitors that show different angles of a scenic view of the Suffolk landscape. From time to time Farhid allows the viewer to get a close up vision of each of the monitors, revealing a stream of mundane images taken from the surrounding landscape. On the other monitor positioned slightly behind the first, possibly intentionally to impede a clear vision, or as the title suggests to literally create a blind spot, there is a man, presumably dead, lying in a partially deflated boat in the water. This image remains constantly still, suspended completely in time, as if on a calculated pause causing a rupture in focus and memory. Although, this image is clearly part of the same landscape the guard in the first monitor remains completely oblivious. The audience are the only ones privy to the calamity that technological surveillance has failed to capture. Interestingly, this incident appears to be the first instance where Farhid hands control over to her audience permitting them to have the supremacy of panoptical vision. However, this form of control is an extremely unwanted and disturbing responsibility for the viewer, which predictably results in the loss of control. Complimentary with this sensation is Farhid's manipulative soundtrack of a 1970s pop icon, which is cunningly on loop especially the part where he confesses about feeling insecure and being out of control. High on the absurdity Blind Spot successfully manages to utilise the ordinary and neglected to create such an intense psychological moment, whereby one bypasses control in order to lose it.

Although Farhid's works may well leave her audiences frustrated at the thought of coming in at the middle, having missed the beginning and ending, they do imply that this is quite an interesting space to occupy.

ArteEast, ArteNews
Sara Raza
2004