Occupying the gallery facing the street on the second floor of Art Mûr is
Mohadese Movahed’s
Voices of Feathers, Voices of Daggers. The show consists of a series of paintings that focus primarily on walls of various kinds. Some are brick, some stone, some are barrier walls, some shops walls, house walls, and so on. These walls are typically framed by or juxtaposed with windows, doorways, and other architectural implements and elements. Occasionally, a fragmented or obscured body part will be seen, but most of the time the presence of the human figure comes in the form of shadows cast on the walls. Within the grids of the walls appear bits of graffiti, posters, and the occasional flower.
According to the accompanying text by Sara Trapara, this work is rooted in the artist’s identity as an Iranian and relates the “psychological complexities of life under oppression.”
This series explores how the built environment is altered by memories and experiences of trauma, oppression and violence. Movahed mobilizes the wall’s metaphor to express the rigidity and inflexibility of authoritarian regimes: the brick and concrete walls dominate the space of his paintings, wired fences, condemned shops, and barricaded windows. These structures visually convey how oppressive power systems impose borders and control public and private spaces. At the same time, the surfaces of the walls are covered with graffiti to the messages of peace, smiling faces, stickers, posters and old photographs, illustrating the transformative potential of the wall as a place of collective expression and resistance.
The graffiti is as much about ass and dirty jokes. The figuring of graffiti tends to highlight the two dominant tendencies in the works: excessive sentimentality bordering on the corny and the vaguely salacious. An exhibitionist quality is provided by the use of windows and other types of framing for the proceedings. “Personality” is usually projected over this in the forms of shadows, but on a couple of occasions, it is figured in frame: in the form of a partial leg that could have come from the cropping found in old
Vogue layouts and as what appears to be a prostitute. The latter figure is shadowed so their face and upper torso are abstracted, leaving over-articulated knees sticking out of boots and some puffy panties.
Most of the figures, however, remain only thin shadows. The surprising thing about them is that their rendering consistently denies them any sense of vitality or even much of a visual presence or surface. Contrasted with the walls, which tend to be over-worked and with noticeably scabby textures applied to them, the human figures are void of much sense of being. Being shadows stresses their weakness as figures in the frame, something that is echoed by the rendering of bird shit on a window in the painting that first greets the viewer upon entrance, which is given more presence than these ghostly humans.
If the “oppressed” figures seem like a pale echo of feces, the “oppressive” figure of the architectural framing has a distinctly kitsch quality. This is accentuated by the choice to use some overly elaborated charity shop frames around a couple of them and by having a length of rope coming out of one magic realist style, extruded into the space of the viewer through a pipe. The colouring of the various buildings adds to their comparative bodily quality (they have depth and texture that the human figures lack) and impresses one with how much the “oppressive” figure
is the work of art and the “oppressed” a vandal who only relates in clichés. This is something of a departure from the artist’s earlier work (at least as represented on their website), which tended to lack the explicitness of this opposition as well as the overtly comic aspect.
This opposition frequently plays out in settings that suggest carnival, from the various awnings to the posters and crude drawings. Such gestures only serve to intensify the impression of the clownish nature of the political melodrama being played out. Nowhere is this more explicit than in the depiction of flowers blossoming from cracks to symbolize hope in a gesture so severely trite it must be a joke. The whole thing smacks of a sad clown on black velvet rendering of “oppression.”
* In some respects no less overwrought but seemingly far more self-conscious about it,
Santiago Tamayo Soler’s
Veneno en la Sangre is housed in the smaller gallery at Centre Clark. Although primarily a video work, it also transforms its allotted space into a viewing room. Painted in earthy (or shitty) brown and sterile greyish cream, placing small bits of wall art up (painting, poster, sculpture, etc.), and even rimming one wall with dirt, the space is divided by a ribbed transparent sheet. At one end is a commercial for corn products that plays on repeat through headphones on an old TV. On the other is a large video monitor that plays the videos that make up the work. These are on a DVD, separated into “episodes” and include extra footage, all of which is run through and cued by the institution, independently of the viewer.
Given that it is Centre Clark, the PR statement for the work is more heavy-handed than the previous. In the text by Marcela Borquez Schwarzbeck we are told that
Through this exhibition, Santiago Tamayo Soler draws on the telenovela, a deeply ingrained phenomenon in the Latin American imaginary, to explore relationships shaped by coloniality, extractivism, and patriarchy from a queer and speculative perspective. Part of a broader world-building practice, here narratives from the margins find space in science fiction, challenging cycles of oppression and loss while imagining alternative futures. […]The telenovela, as an inherited structure, has conditioned emotional, familial, and gender dynamics for generations. In Tamayo Soler’s work, its traditional archetypes are subverted, with romantic and homoerotic elements introducing new tensions to masculinity, care, and desire. The oft-idealized Latin American landscape is reimagined as a barren, toxic environment. […] Despite its speculative character, Veneno en la Sangre remains faithful to the telenovela’s essence—unexpected twists, resourceful storytelling, and complex, epic narratives. Tamayo Soler reclaims the genre, transforming it into a tool for critical reflection and imagination.
I sat through it twice, but not a lot of the characteristics listed were there. The “narrative” is so vague and ill-defined it is almost entirely meaningless. Its structure even suspends the notion of the “future” since it is so non-linear, something extended by the way the piece is displayed by the gallery. The same applies to relational notions like “oppression” since there is even less substantive structural context than in a Beckett play. The “world” is simply two barely created “characters” in a primarily computer-generated world sharing some elliptical memories and running through a series of gestures. While Soler’s Recado, shown at Bradley|Ertaskiran, came closer to achieving what the supplement offers as framing, the appropriation of the telenovela here results in something quite different.
Telenovelas often get lumped in with soap operas, which is unfair to both. Soaps tend to be far more complex, demanding, and icily paced, whereas telenovelas are stupider, more convoluted, and speedier. Very little of either is really on display (beyond some antiquated parody in the title sequence), whether in terms of tone, texture, or structure. What Soler extracts from the telenovela is some vague type of melodrama, which places it all in the overly familiar area of Camp (which “conditions” most of the formal logic of the work) while marketing it with a loose “exoticism” that it performatively “subverts.” Filtering the fantasy of the lush south into the “barren” only assimilates it to the familiar register of sci-fi, much as the reliance on traditional Queer archetypes quarantines its signifying practice. This type of fudging makes more obvious what is really at play which is that the framing of the “practice” is just a recycling of subgenre tropes more than it is an extramural indexing of the experience of “generations.”
Even in the 1960s, Camp was often regarded as a trite and tired phenomenon that was aesthetically reactionary and sanctimoniously stupid. By the 1980s, it had become completely institutionalized and consecrated and now serves as one of the primary rhetorical means to mummify any form of desire. This impotent feeling hangs over most of the exhibition and, arguably, is even thematized in the setting itself (whether within the video or in the treatment of the gallery space as a prop for the video). Ultimately, however, the “dystopia” evoked by the work amounts to the experience of someone playing a DVD in a cheap, slightly depressing, and cramped theme restaurant. This is suitable since the only really significant thing about the work is how clear it makes the significance of already antiquated technology (itself a traditional Camp move).
This also points to what is “subversive” about it, or, more accurately, what is
redemptive about it. Television, and television melodrama in particular, is notable for its industrial mode of production, its radical undermining of organic character history, reliable perspective, authoritative voice or intentionality, extreme use of duration, and a continual alienation from the “tension” of narrative involvement through intrusive commercials. As indicated above, to the degree that any of this is at play in Soler’s installation, it paradoxically undermines the attempt to subvert it. The mode of display relied upon by the artist and gallery moves in the direction of a more generically humanist and culturalist model that leans on authoritative statements to seem meaningful. Even the “commercial” is segregated behind a sanitary wall and performatively placed in a distant time period to purify the already obfuscated (and so fetishized) fantasy of a “narrative.” In the extremely limited ways that the “commercial” appears in the episodes, it is symbolically neutralized and assimilated rather than prompting disassociation. While the Queer and post-colonial tropes that are exploited by the artist and gallery do have a certain analogous function to that of canned corn, rather than being a disruption, they provide a homogenizing overcoding.
.jpg)
