July 1, 2012 |
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On Behazin
Mirak Jamal
Behazin was, throughout my upbringing in exile away from country and relatives, an abstract figure. he was the absent grandfather that I never came to know past our initial years in post-revolution Iran. Nevertheless his presence was cast over photo-albums, family conversations, and cited political referencing. –Mirak Jamal
Composed of twelve discrete panels, On Behazin was created through a process of alternating between hand drawn images and a xeroxed copy of each successive image, all based on an original inkjet print. Behazin was born in 1915 as Mahmoud Etemadzadeh in Rasht, Iran and came of age in a time of significant political transition and upheaval; from the constitutional movements spear-headed by the revolutionary Mirza Kuchak Khan, to the hysteria of WWI and the gripping debate of the Bolshevik Revolution. Along with the particulars of Behazin’s background and extensive career as an activist, writer and translator, the knowledge of Behazin’s presence within Iran exist in various archives that demand an intermediary to translate and convey such details to the artist. This project comprises an online and offline installation which will be launched in September 2012.
The work creates a developing trajectory for itself as each image revises the one before it, and on this website, reflects the act of relaying the image and dispersing it through the digital realm. The nuanced flaws of each rendering – both hand drawn and photocopied – become progressively more emphasized with each alternation. Shaded regions become many degrees darker and stray marks become more pronounced until they completely engulf the image.
Through the transformation of the image in this dynamic repetition, Jamal describes a process of “defying memory through the material, and in turn defying material imagery as the absolute construction for our memory.” It is through this process of repetition that On Behazin directly explores the degradation of the image and, by extension, the breakdown of symbolic meaning. As the piece moves away from its original inkjet print, it brushes against the limits of representation through its measured approach to the point at which semiotics breaks down and the image is no longer able to communicate its original meaning. From a distinguishable representation of a man, the piece develops into a charcoal rendering of xerox ink on paper.
However, this series of images is not simply a linear progression into negative space contrasting image and absence. Instead, the process of altering the images in incremental degrees with changing media allows each development to engage separately with the continuum of representation to illustration, illustration to abstraction and from abstraction to negation. It is at a point between representation and negation that we are able to discern the moment where memory fades and we are no longer able to draw the original out of peripheral accumulations of Jamal’s process.
The digital presentation of this work will be accompanied by an installation piece to be launched in a forthcoming event in New York. Like the transformation of the image through the serialized alternation seen in twelve images featured in On Behazin, the installation piece probes the breakdown of representation by repeatedly copying and printing the original inkjet print until the mechanism of the installation are no longer able to produce the image on paper. In an inverse of Jamal’s original approach to the image, the serialized image in the instillation piece will progressively lose detail until the entire image is reduced to a blank white page. Together, the online gallery and the real-time display of the installation will enact the memory of Behazin and reinvigorate the image through the monumental scale of the internet, all the while questioning its very materiality.
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Behazin_18_Paris copy
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Mirak Jamal is an artist born in Iran, and who since after the revolution has come to grow up in the former Soviet Union, Germany, the U.S., and finally Canada. Not bound to any one medium, his work echoes a process of redeployment of autobiographical anecdotes with that of historiographies and collectivities. He currently resides in Berlin from where he engages internationally. |
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