160 Years of Pressure — Rashin Fahandej

160 YEARS OF PRESSURE, 2007-2011, series of video and sound installations.

In collaboration with sound artist, and graphic essayist Krista Dragomer

“Born in Iran and the United States, our artistic collaboration is a sociopolitical position. It embodies our purpose in creating artworks: physically bringing together bodies, cultures, and artistic mediums to create a moment of encounter where the preconceptions we hold about each other and ourselves collapse. Collaboration is a practice and praxis that actualizes the types of connections we seek to investigate in our work and establish with our audience.”

Description:

Iran, Badasht, north of Tehran – 95 miles

United States, Seneca Falls, north of New York – 270 miles

1848, a woman in Iran by the name of Tahirih unveiled her face in a group of men in a proclamation of undeniable equality.

1848, a group of women in the United States, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright, and Jane Hunt met for tea and began the women’s suffrage movement.

160 Years of Pressure parallels that wavelike motion now set in the intimate, personal space of one woman. The sound, video, drawings, and objects that comprise the project, in total, explore isolated moments of self-reflection, repulsion, confusion, outrage, and desire, and the building pressure of that tumult. It is our response to what has or has not taken place since the circumstances in 1848.

Since the inception of this project in 2006 we have been working with the sound and images in ways that subvert the cohesion of images as primary sources of information. The audio and the visual each operate within its own structures of tension allows for perceptions of power to shift between the two elements. When paired, they complicate each other, creating a shifting perceptual terrain that does not only exist in representation, but it is actualized through its physical play on the body. The sounds and images continuously modify each other, in a poetic structure more empathic than explanatory.