Maryam Tafakory’s recent video work invites a renewed sensibility in how we understand the poetic-political function of one of the fundamental elements of cinema: editing. Taken from popular Iranian films, each fragment is a window into a world of domestic and psychological tensions, building cumulative gravity out of what remains unseen, unsaid, forbidden. It is a generously citational and polyvocal method to address the dependent relationship between censorship and invention in modern Iranian visual culture.
Influenced by historical film research and a lifelong intimacy with its source material, Tafakory’s work falls within multiple overlapping formal lineages: the essay film, the cinephile documentary, the “video essay”. native online. Iranian bag, 2021, comes closest to the third category, largely thanks to its extensive on-screen annotations. As images of physical contact between the sexes were banned after the Iranian Revolution, everyday objects became imbued with symbolic meaning. Tafakory compiles scenes in which handbags are used as “mediators of [the prohibition of] touch”, conduits for narrowly eluded forms of contact, whether tender or violent.
Nazarbazi, 2022, expands on its more compact and academic predecessor with a dizzying carousel of distorted clips, accompanied by an ambitious, non-diegetic soundscape and on-screen text that pepper Tafakory’s writing with many artistic and philosophical influences. . Or Iranian bag dictates, Nazarbazi disorients, extracting its source images from any narrative context in the service of a suggestive “game of gazes”. Even more experimental is two-channel video She stuttered, 2023, featured in the LUX Library alongside an artist-curated playlist. These poor images are manipulated to the extent that their glitches and crackles have a brutality close to a violent collision. The austerity of this brief work reveals the critical core of Tafakory’s practice, in which the compilation of archival material suggests the political necessity of looking askance at both the everyday and its remediation in the moving image.
