Tarlan Lotfizadeh
Bearing witness to a missing testimony
22.07.2023 - 18.08.2023
︎︎︎ http://www.tarlanlotfizadeh.com
Vernissage / Opening
21.07.2023, 19 Uhr
Ausstellung / Exhibition
22.07.2023 - 18.08.2023
Artist Talk with Bassma El Adisey
13.08.2023, 16 Uhr.
Guided Tour
22.07.2023 & 18.08.2023, 19 Uhr.
“whenever I listen to a stone, I hear a song of a white dove.” Installation View at Kunstraum Aarau, 2023 / photo: Romain Gaigg
“whenever I listen to a stone, I hear a song of a white dove.” Installation View at Kunstraum Aarau, 2023 / photo: Romain Gaigg
“seven or so hours lingering on being a witness” Installation View at Kunstraum Aarau, 2023 / photo: Romain Gaigg
“seven or so hours lingering on being a witness” Installation View at Kunstraum Aarau, 2023 / photo: Romain Gaigg
"Bearing witness to a missing testimony" ist ein vergeblicher Versuch, die fehlenden Erinnerungen von sechs Steinen zu wecken, von denen jeder ein Ereignis zu einem bestAimmten Zeitpunkt der Geschichte bezeugt."
„Bearing witness to a missing testimony" is a futile effort to recall missing memories of six pieces of stones, each bearing witness to an event at some point in history.
kunstraum aarau, Ochsengässli 7, 5000 Aarau
Tarlan Lotfizadeh. Bearing Witness to a Missing Testimony (22.7.–18.8.2023)
Stones do not speak
(Bassma El Adisey)
In the seventh episode of the first season of the series « Stargate » the team around Colonel Jack O'Neill, played by Richard Dean Anderson (b. 1950), lands once again on an amazingly strange planet: In the midst of a powdery yellow desert, fragmented blue crystals lie scattered around the arrival site. The research team initially thinks they have encountered the ruins of a ritual site. It is not until later in the episode – after O'Neill is knocked unconscious by the touch of a crystal and the crystal has made a duplicate of his human form as its own new life form and learns to speak – that the gate travelers realize the crystals are not ceremonial artifacts. The earthlings learn that the stones are the remains of a higher life form that was massacred and left in an open mass grave before arriving at this location. Why am I telling this here? We also encounter initially silent minerals in Tarlan Lotfizadeh's (b. 1984) exhibition at Kunstraum Aarau. The title « Bearing Witness to a Missing Testimony » (2023) is borrowed from Giorgio Agamben's ( b. 1942) « Was von Auschwitz bleibt » and refers to the philosopher's examination of the possibility of bearing witness to the unwitnessable in the face of the horrors of the Shoah – Agamben confronts the readers of his writing with the question of how survivors of Auschwitz can become witnessing subjects when Auschwitz itself has so dehumanized them? Lotfizadeh's expe rimental set - up is not about subjects from the very beginning. This does not make the failure that is inherent in the project right at the beginning any less fruitful. Stones do not speak, but: Why am I telling this here? In six video screenshots, edited with red tape in such a way that only the stones located by the artist in the images are visible in small peepholes, Lotfizadeh's work « those who saw the Gorgon have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute » (2021) is the prelude to a multilayered spatial installation consisting of five parts. At the center of the work complex are six stones. Silently they outlast time and with it, space, which, according to the artist, is able to inscribe itself into everything. Purely on the basis of their pictorial form, she brings the silent extras of the video from the screen recordings into her exhibition. With the help of 3D printers, the artist assembles five of the six boulders on the Aarau witness bench. Only the title of this sculptural intervention – « whenever i listen to a stone, i hear a song of a white dove. (Mahmoud Darwish) » (2021) – relieves the plastic copies of the perpetual silence. Nevertheless, a chorus of fervently singing voices can be heard in the distance. They sound from the loudspeakers of an adjacently placed video work. « seven hours or so lingering on being witness » (2021)
is a four - minute excerpt from a recording of the seven - hour printing process made by a surveillance camera at the Tehran printing studio. In addition to the whirring and clattering of the automatic production process, the singing described above can be heard. In reference to Søren Kierkegaard's (1813 - 1855) « Die Krankheit zum Tode » the artist mounts the socialist revolutionary hymn « The People United Shall Never Be Defeated » by Sergio Ortega (1938 - 2003), played backwards, into her video t o break the spell of the music . The epic - like soundscape evokes a sense of reluctant voyeurism. What are we watching here? Have we forgotten that this desperate attempt to give voice to the silent stones can never succeed? Unconsciously, our gaze falls on the print compartment with the number four at the bottom right. Nothing seems to move here, no material is applied, no vain witness emerges. Only later, turned away from the video and also mentally arrived back in the art space, the « failed piece »
(2021) appears at the back left, illuminated by a spotlight. For the Kunstraum Aarau, Lotfizadeh has expanded her installation with a series of 39 chalk - worked cyanotypes on a red background. Darkly, the iron blue reveals the shades of a topography. Somewhere hidden, the watermark of the virtual globe software has crept in, whose images had served as a template for the unknown printed landscape. Short vertical chalk strokes break through it, depositing themselves on the sheets and reminding us of the markings that prisoners scribble on prison walls – more than half of our bones consist of inorganic minerals, including lime. Why am I telling you this? Tarlan Lotfizadeh'sartistic practice is like a forensic archaeology in which the places and the people who visit them inevitably merge. How can it be that we feel, mourn, love, despair, in short live, and all this is supposed to be deposited only in our own memory?
If we believe that all these sensations determine our being, then we must also believe that they influence our environment through our body and permeate ourselves as well as the things around us, charging them. At least, in view of Tarlan Lotfizadeh's works, we can be sure that every life leaves its traces, even if sometimes it seems that these traces are nothing more than plays of light on the hard chunks of the enduring earth. Who pays attention to the reappearance, is able to illuminate many a dark corner with it. Why do I tell this here? Perhaps because stones cannot speak.