New Currents: Dissonant Chords
While studying for an MFA at the Malmö Art Academy in 2008, then 24-year-old Shirin Sabahi became acquainted with her Swedish landlord, a retired engineer named Jan Edman who had visited Iran to work on the development of local businesses in the 1960s and the 1970s, and had recorded his impressions on 8 mm film. This personal archive, a sequence of sunlit five-to-ten-second flickers of silent footage, are the starting point for Sabahi’s 14-minute video Swede Home (2009).
In a newly recorded voice-over, Edman offers spontaneous thoughts over the images. Some of his words are those of a tourist. “It is fantastic what they can carry on their heads,” he says of four women balancing bundles of provisions on top of their headscarves. Some comments reveal personal and professional fetish–“this is a Swedish air compressor,” he remarks over an unusually long shot of a boxy and anonymous object. Others speak of violence just beyond the camera’s remit: security around a building where Edman stayed existed, he explains, “to prevent robbing, or other complicated things.” A tortoise in a field, with a matchbox perched on its back, has no commentary at all.
Swede Home certainly operates within a recent art vogue for repurposed archives, a desire to harness the past in attractive and illuminating ways. Yet Sabahi shows particular promise in this crowded field through a purity and tenderness of touch. She shows patience for old memories and old materials to reveal their essence; she places the value of information above the opportunism of aesthetics. The artist continued to tease out the potential meaning in the archive with a parallel voice-over and stand-alone series of photographs, Untitled (District Sixteen) (2010), recorded by a contemporary photographer. She plans to exhibit the two works together in 2011, and her open conversation with a subjective fragment of Iranian history will continue.
William Pym
ArtAsiaPacific Magazine, no. 72, Mar/Apr 2011
© 2007-2011 Shirin Sabahi
