20 Meter Narration

We are certainly living in a world where the external forces for making uniformity and sameness of human beings are indeed strong. As a result, adopting pre-defined positions for a subject who is to accept a definite sex and race is experienced like a trauma. This leads to one’s alienation from the real self and the fragmentation of one’s being, exerting an overwhelming and long lasting presence in one’s life. The outcome is to live a tedious and dull life, that is, living each day is deferred to another day.

’20 Meter Narration’ points to the crisis in identity and its representation, through depiction of invisible and suppressed layers of reality. In other words, it underlines the instability of personality and external narrations constructed for this purpose. In the meantime, it endeavors to eradicate the borders that define and dictate the limits of independent art mediums. In ’20 Meter Narration’, ambiguous gender and sexual identities of the subjects are represented by breaking down the borders separating women and men, going beyond differences and putting aside the existing markers of each and every subject, in order to introduce a post-human and a post-gendered persona. With her work, the artist makes possible the access to the other side of dividing identity classifications, as she has come to realize that all subjects enjoy the possibility of changing endlessly. In other words, the subject is in the perpetual and unstoppable process of creation of the self.

Images in ’10 Meter Narration’ are all the elements and parts of a single narration about suffering, and the dialectic between suffering and its expression is well represented therein. It is of course far from a linear and coherent narration, and gets close to the form of a chaotic or hysteric narration, in which the hysteric expression is likewise introduced. Therefore, the existing rules of representation and expression are distorted, displaced and deconstructed.

In this art work, we are dealing with a range of frozen human figures caught in chain and placed in an iron cage while experiencing a melancholic situation. The outcome of this circumstance is their split from the historic and cultural contexts of their time. They seem to be incapable of even establishing communications with other present or future subjects. Due to the pain of trauma, anxiety & horror hidden in the violence, and also because of increasing normalization of injustice, these figures have become speechless and silent. This state heralds a traumatic event. The human subjects are in fact suppressed, exploited and constructed by external forces that rule over them. These forces are the fruits of individual and collective interactions of the subject. Hence, the ideological illusions founded upon notions such as freedom and an individual independent from history and relations are well questioned. Suffering is truly a social phenomenon scattered over each and every moment of our life, so to exert its strong presence. The psychological structure of each person and our fellow human beings, the language system and our customs have all turned into the tools of affliction to produce pain and suffering. Our lives are full of traumas and tragedies that could not be expressed in language. Because of traumatic experiences in life, there is only one mental form: a disturbed mind who is speaking frantically. Suffering could not be expressed in words. Speaking of traumas in one’s life is thus impossible. As a consequence, a confused narrative form is more prone to orient us to the hidden reality in the confused experiences lived by people, something that a consistent and linear narration with a definite beginning and ending could not accomplish.

Helina Maryam Ghaemi