Ab-Anbar is delighted to announce (In)Visible by Sanaz Mazinani, her first solo exhibition in Tehran.
The exhibition presents over a decade's work by the artist, with her most recent video Threshold, 2015, reconfiguring explosion scenes from Hollywood movies into stunning kaleidoscopic geometries of colour, pattern and movement. The video is perspectival, raising questions about the beauty in destruction, where conflict becomes a spectacle that asks viewers to 'consider the complexities of entertainment, mass media and the violence of war'. Accompanying this single-channel video, six-channel audio piece are photographs, prints, drawings, and assemblages; all of which draw on Mazinani's investigations into perspective, space, repetition and repeatability via the photographic medium.
Mazinani continues to be driven by the impetus to reveal how photographs inform doctrines aimed at furthering particular political agendas. In a sense, this revelation frees them from their ideological function and reveals the politics and instability of images. Further complicated by their digital circulation, this entanglement of representation is exposed particularly in the militarisation of images in times of war and conflict where the blurring of facts from fictions, truth and untruths are pertinent.
Working from a personal archive of images - found and digital that Mazinani has collected for some time - her initial reluctance to work with this medium stemmed from the vast assimilation of images that we currently experience, where every moment is captured and circulated, shared and stored via the Internet. Mazinani however, is interested in adopting a critical perspective on ways of looking at images that already exist in the world, through (re) considering the ways in which images are used create and make meaning.