What follows from the opening sequence is a series of image clips, fragments, as if wrenched from more prolonged narrative sources, these visual fragmented elements have in common the night, what goes on in the night, what goes on in the ‘after dark’. There is a powerful almost subterranean quality to the series of rolling images, cars being broken into, sex chat line conversations, clandestine meetings in dark streets, empty car parks as sites of secret exchange and the imposing sounds and images of law enforcement, however the latter seem only on the periphery of this darkness. Farhid makes no moral or judgemental comment in this work she carefully binds together these fragmented strands of social existence, if anything what this process does is reflect upon a certain kind of underclass seeking out an existence outside the boundaries of mainstream society. This is also evidenced in her approach to film making in which the notion of the genre, the stable and familiar forms of representation are undermined ‘ de-secured’, taken apart and re-structured. She carefully avoids the rhetoric of the genre by working in this way whilst touching upon the familiar, as in the rain soaked night shots and the out of focus distressed images of criminality she does not allow the viewer to languish in the space of popular image making. This is clearly the case in the videos final sequences were the various subjects are overwhelmed by water, submerged and engulfed but in this abstracted approach it is neither spectacular nor romantic.
Review: at Art Tomorrow, by Peter Cross
Exhibition History:
2013 - This Fanciful Digression, Black Maria - Richard Wentworth, Granary Building, London
2013 - The Fourth Wall, CAN - Centre d'art Neuchâtel, Switzerland
2009 - Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Théātre du Chātelet, Paris
2009 - Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
2009 - Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid
