UNCLEAR DEAL
16 NOV - 16 DEC 2015
The Mine presented uNclear deal, a photography and video art group exhibition of 12 prominent Iranian artists.
Our most sincere witness is mute and yet most communicative. What realizations would we face if the city’s inaudible whispers could be voiced? Can the camera act as it's interpreter?
Whilst it has been argued that we are the product of our environment, uNclear deal looked at the city as the product of its society. We have long looked at remnants of past urbanism to understand the culmination of socio-politico-economic characteristics; the walls, streets, and people, all form a point of intersection, a moment of centrality, defining decisions that have shaped the built environment and, in turn, mapped the structure of agreements and interactions that constitute the cultural and political frame of a society and its future.
uNclear deal was seen through the lens of a selection of 12 of Iran's most prominent artists, with artworks that depict the city and urban experience as the figurative expression of the prevailing and uncertain Iranian socio-political climate. With the artist as a conduit, each visual record reconstructs social experience to take on a form of relational practice.
Iran’s urban structures can be read as we would: a palimpsest, the layering of past and present, juxtapositions of sound and form, movement and static, youth and decay. The superimposition of generations that have unfolded in fragile autarky makes Iran’s infrastructure a silent but candid portraiture of the underlying borders drawn between the directing elite and its people.
This exhibition saw the city as the hushed witness of what has been and acted as a testimonial tapestry of experience, a proof of photographic presence, to better discern what the new deal would bring to the Iranians, expose its contrasts, and bring to light its secrets. The scattered “No Photography” urban signs testify to the truth held in the captures, immortalizing the city’s behaviors: a smile passing by, a frown, an elegant building alongside slums.
The city holds sundry contradictions and unclear statements—statements left behind by those who have experienced the streets, their sounds, form, and space. Every imprint is both a scar and a symbol of mending. The polluted veil makes for abstract beauty, but what remains in an utmost state of abstraction is really what is most obvious. We are subject to circular causality, whereby the streets mirror their inhabitants’ experiences but also generate them.
ARTWORKS
INSTALLATION VIEW
