According to the accompanying text by Catherine Barnabé, Maryam Eizadifard’s Fragment-s de silence I at Optica “attempts to sense the effects that spaces have on the body. Specifically, in places where the body has no reference point. She is attentive to the imprint of the body’s memory that can be awakened by theses spaces. A smell, a familiar atmosphere, the handling of an object can arouse a buried memory and, suddenly, a new environment becomes a point of reference.”
The exhibition uses a few different tactics to approach this. The text goes on to explain that the artist ritualistically cut herself off from “the outside world” and stayed in a basement in Terrbonne which, by environmental analogy, reminded her of her childhood in Iran. It was here, under these experimental conditions, that she made the drawings that form the base of the work.
Eizadifard has created three distinct areas: spanning two walls are a series of glass pieces with photos suspended in them; on another, a series of texts on acetate that begin legible and gradually become less so through superimposition; and the central space is taken up by two-sided depictions of elements of trees suspended in open wood frames that are stationed at various heights on metal poles. Accompanying all this is a musical composition by Saku Mantere.
The, if we can call it this, “forest” aspect at the centre is quite effective on its own. If the stated goal was to evoke an alien space to drift through as you gradually familiarize yourself, very loosely, with it, then it could have (and should have) been left here.
If anything, this could have been expanded to include the entire space and significantly magnify this experiential possibility. However, this doesn’t seem to be the point.
The triangulation of the three aspects, too bulky to be either marginal or supplementary, directly hampers this.
While on their own terms, neither of the secondary features (text and glass) have much to recommend themselves, together they function to narrate the rest. While this narrativity itself is barely functional (the glass seems a distant non-sequitur and the text performs its own illegibility), it is functional to the extent that it undercuts the potential of the forest and points it back to its subjective enframing.
The “trees”, of course, already act all of this out on their own and far more provocatively that the other aspects.
Their parodying of the form of the tree and hybridization with display, their disarticulation of the visual record of a tree through its multiplication and distortion, and the capacity for their animation through movement among them allow for a variable field of engagement that contains a level of formalized self-reflexivity.
This kind of material self-reflexivity is very different from the subjective one that the framing forces on the work.
It is the insistence on referentiality, the attempt to subjectively colonize the alien that she undertakes that weakens the installation. In practice, the exhibition serves to demonstrate the absurdity of this tactic.
This weakness is due in part to the fact that the central element is too strong for the other two and the melodrama of spatial experience that she constructs cannot fully contain that it is the potential impersonality of the work’s objective state that overshadows the attempt to subjectify it.