This demanding visual structuring is further supported by a very particular use of sound which is imported rather than localised, sound here creates an extreme tension, the image is heightened by the corresponding sound, a window closes to a screeching edginess, a sound made by the central character is echoed and reinforced in another image of a line of yellow coated policeman. Music is used not as an unmediated accompaniment to the image but as a subliminal ‘going on in your head’ activity. Images are culled from a multiplicity of sources and genres from real time footage of the performer Girolamo Marri Caciotti to documentary material, medical educational film and the use of animation, these are all used as means to constructing a fragmented collage which enables the main proposition of this piece to be made visible. What Farhid explores in Flash Point is what happens when the normalisation of events, of our becoming socialised, is disturbed, when the patterns of our everyday life, the way with which we negotiate the world around us through our engagement with society’s established social practices are forcibly withdrawn through some form of physiological disruption. The outcome of which is a dis-ordering od memory and a re-valuing of experiences. However what is crucial here is that she is not exploring already well documented medical conditions like schizophrenia or other kinds of psychosis or for that matter the use of hallucinatory drugs, but in a more philosophical and political sense there is a fragility and an instability to the controlling forces that determine our lives.
Olivia Usher, Oct 2006
Exhibition History:
2009 - Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds
2008 – Use this kind of Sky, E:vent Gallery, London
