512
Beacon Project

Tracing Us

Tracing Us is a performative drawing in which the artist, who is both the subject and object, traces the visitors and shadows of a living material.

Read More

Tracing Us is a performative drawing in which the artist becomes a camera out of flesh, an archive machine that works with the transparency and opacity, a limited framed perspective (almost like a viewfinder or a camera lens), and constantly traces a view to the fluidity and temporality of the space and time. On one side there is an installation of a custom-made light stand holding a small textile screen that the black-eyed pea sprouts attached to it shape the word Us in Farsi. The word is an alive organism; the sprouts shift their shapes every minute due to dehydration. As a continuous practice, the artist traces the outlines of the changing shadows of the sprouts on a paper on the wall, as if we may forget the shape of this word. It becomes a drawing archive which serves the memory to memorize the word Us through its various shapes and changes. In the absence of the homeland, language, sense of human sameness, and more and more bold pronunciation of Otherness in our time, Bahmanipour finds her connection with here-now and its inevitable sociopolitical changes through the concept of ‘us’, and its slippery and plural body. She makes constant attempts to remember and practice writing and reading this word, to preserve and present the outline of its shape on the gallery wall, where it can be looked at, be read, be visited. Across the room there will be a standing plexiglass piece that the artist goes behind it to trace everything that can be seen through the plexiglass, including the visitors and the installation across the room. The space becomes a picture plane, allows the artist to document the gallery’s space and time, its changes, and what it means to become us, to remain us, and archives these documentations through her repetitive act of tracing. From the other side, for the visitors, the artist becomes the object, who is subjecting them. Both sides of the glass become object and subject at the same time through the constant back and forth reflections that the space provides to both sides’ visions. The concept of the word Us is inseparable from the concept of Microcosm. Specific connections, sense of order and belonging, inclusion, and exclusion are required for both concepts, of Us and Microcosm, to exist. The artist’s gesture, body, and act of tracing, archiving, writing, perpetual practicing, become the core of such microcosm. This project is against stagnation, getting finished, or completed, it is always in the notion of becoming, always in the phase of production, although the artist constantly tries to capture and trace the shape of Us; on one side of the space metaphorically, and on the other side literally. This project dives into many entanglements with art histories; from Alberti’s definition of Perspective and canvas (painting) to Persian miniature representations of simultaneous narratives. Bahmanipour investigates into the relationships between memory, (forms of) monument, gesture, body, and nature as elements that are constantly in the notion of changing, healing, growing, regenerating through death.

Saturday, Oct 19th
6:00 PM - 12:00 AM
Live Performance

Location

The Shuffle

31 Queen St, Dartmouth

Wheelchair accessible - If you require the accessible entrance, kindly ask on of our volunteers to accompany you.