INTERFACE
Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
REVIEW
Shirana Shahbazi: The Garden
Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin
6 January – 22 March
Reviewed by: Justin Carville
Following her success as the 2002 Citigroup Photography Prize winner, Shirana Shahbazi's current show 'The Garden' continues her exploration of the themes of banality and the everyday in photographic practice.
The geographical location of 'The Garden' is her adopted home of Switzerland rather than her native Iran, yet the photographs could be anywhere. Consisting of large colour photographic portraits, random domestic and municipal spaces together with a commissioned portrait from a commercial Iranian painter, the seemingly random assemblage of photographs leaves us geographically groundless.
Presentation here is a matter of displacement rather than simply misplacement – the photographs are not arbitrarily arranged but are deliberately (dis)placed to negate any linear or narrative reading of the images.
The crux of Shahbazi's body of work is not so much the images themselves but the way in which their presentation asks questions of how 'we' – the western viewer – read images. Diptych, triptych, the juxtaposition and sequential ordering of images from left to right on magazine pages and the gallery wall are all familiar process of presentation employed to facilitate the viewer in making sense of their encounter with a range of visual objects. These are strategies that bind images together and frame practices of looking. Not only are the images familiar but their presentation is structured in such a way as to make meaning easily identifiable.
In 'The Garden' however, the viewer is required to look at photographs through the lens of the exile, to see the unfamiliar aspects of what had once been thought familiar. The seemingly transparent, universal language of photography has been rendered opaque. Shahbazi's presentation negates any possible familiar narrative reading, the photographic objects may be easily identifiable but their relationship to one another is not so readily available.
Writer detail:
JUSTIN CARVILLE
teaches Hist. & Theoretical Studies in Photography at the Inst. of A&D and Technology, Dulaoghaire.
Venue detail:
Back to topPost your comment
No one has commented on this article yet, why not be the first?
To post a comment you need to login