Disquieting Geography 

It’s a fitting time for the extraordinary work of Atefeh Farajolahzadeh: displacements, anxiety, separation, alienation, isolation, and a desire, even a yearning for a sense of rootedness. At the same time, and giving us the frisson of contradiction in the work, is at times a kind of thrill in the Baudrillardian American road-emptiness, the flat surfaces, the sense of self projected onto a screen multiplied in an infinite regression. If one work captures this complex ambivalence most, it’s the self divided by the liminal thresholds of mirrors, projections, windows and the eyes of the yearning artist sharing her subject position with the audience in No Answer. Like Hitchcock in Rear Window, she draws up the blinds, asking us to look out as a prelude or a mode of looking in, just as reflection may be proximate to refraction: what do we see when we look out but a version of ourselves, a transfigured sense of longing projected or poetically inscribed on the landscape: grasses pointing us towards… what? … ghostly forms in the sky … a pentimento of forms that suggest memory has been left out overnight.  

Atefeh Farajolahzadeh’s photographs, like her videos, are about the disquieting moment or moments when we encounter parts of the world that are fleeting or almost-lost, dreams of memories or memories of dreams – what’s the difference in the moment after we wake up?  

Also: in many of the images and short films, a woman is trying to not be lost. She seems to be in constant motion: a quick eye, a captured search for what’s missing, haunted by others who remain shadows that might pierce at a wrong turn. In the end, we’re marked by a woman who is marked, graphic lines on the body like scars, a photograph that suggests darkly, in the geography of its sepia-like self-enclosure, that perhaps there’s no place, like home.

David Lazar  

Professor, Creative Writing  at Columbia College Chicago  
Editor, Hotel Amerika  
Co-editor, 21st Century Essays , Ohio State University Press     

ARTIST CONTACT

- ATEFEH FARAJOLAHZADEH -

atefehfara@gmail.com

www.atefehfar.com