Shoja Azari "Windows"
Leila Heller Gallery (Chelsea)
This event has ended.
The idea of making a film, or rather films looking through windows, first came to me when I was watching one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films. I think it was Whitey. There was a long tracking shot moving from one character to the other, while they were seated at two sides of a table, engaged in conversation. In the space between the characters, there was a painting of a landscape. The camera framed this painting on its journey back and forth between the two protagonists. I remember thinking about that painting as a "window" into another world, and that while I, as the viewer, was made aware of it, the painting went completely unnoticed by the characters in Fassbinder’s film. For Fassbinder, this device was a very efficient and effective way to relate to his audience the implicit and indispensable connection between his characters and that of the German landscape. For me, there was a sudden realization of my relationship to the country I have been living in for the last twenty years as an exile. An exile’s identity is caught, if you wish, between "here" and "there". "Here", is in "no-man’s land", an area of being in-between, of permanent transit, a state of not belonging. And, "there" is a constant search for a fading horizon, once the sweet idea of "home", it is now reduced to nothing but a distant nostalgic memory. This experience of displacement and distancing makes an exile a virtual audience. A window has been used as a metaphor in film as well as painting in opening a representational world to the viewer beyond the visible planes. A window suggests the idea of the gaze, of looking, of an intrinsic voyeuristic act. It is the predicament of an exile, it seems that the world appears to him as he were looking at it through a window. In this sense then, I think an artist is a self-imposed exile. (...)
Media
Schedule
from October 11, 2012 to November 10, 2012