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Doom
Classifying things that human beings have to do for their survival today there is probably one thing that is harder than working two shifts in a mine or a thousand meters under the ground or even being subjected to toxic gas, and that is “reading”. Reading? Reading texts in Telegram channels 24/7? Reading comments in Instagram? Reading newspapers? Reading books? Reading card numbers and cards? Reading an indictment? In fact what seems to be hard is not reading the word after reading but reading itself. Situations survive or transform only in the way one reads oneself and this is where complication start. If we consider seeing to be a form of reading, seeing an indictment is a repetitive form of reading it. Now imagine convicts, in different periods of time, who faced with the same indictment because of their own actions, insist on repeating the same approach towards the problem. This means that while looking at the indictment they still insist on the cause for the indictment as if that is the only way they have found to survive.
It is indeed by understanding this mechanism that one finds a way to understand the key sentence in Alexander Borovsky’s article “A Foreword for Mehrdad Khataei”. In this article, after tracking various ways in analyzing contemporary sketches and prints and Khateie’s method in his work, Borovsky brings the reader to a key sentence on how to read Khataei’s work: “what interests the artist is not the event but a fundamental understanding of the human capacity for resistance.” Passing through this event is the path Khataei started in his last collection, “Chernoville”, and ends with his new one. A road that throughout a three year process draws its initial complexities from relying on the title and ends with the structural body of form in the work. In an interview with Rokhdadhonar website, a year before his new collection, Khataei himself notes that “Chernoville” was the chosen title for that collection in order to create a metaphoric condition. But what surrounds us after three years is a series of images that, in their partial or general forms, adopt a definite attitude in procedure to prevent any kind of progress in the event-based reading method of the visual account. That is to say, along this way, and by gathering together tangible and intangible visual signs, Khataei does not intend to refer to a conjunction of the visual account embedded in the darkness and light of his work, but the assemblage in this new collection is a mechanism for traversing the events that artist’s visual account transforms their original narrative. This is perhaps why both the crucified Christ and the naked dolls have the same share in the composition of works.
What eventually complicates the final indictment about the path and method of Khataei’s narrative arises from a situation we called “the transformation in the original narrative of the visual signs” in this new collection. A situation that Borovsky sees, in Chernoville, in the appearance of mutated animals which arise from the heart of the disaster like an evil myth and which we see, in this new collection, as characters that in the course of relief from a mythical narrative have shaped into mythical figures. And this is exactly where a more difficult verb than “to read” appears and that is “to see”: To see myths that, according to Mircha Eliade, the Romanian philosopher, deny the past in order to find their way to survive in the narrative of today’s life.
Appendix:
- “A Foreword for Mehrdad Khataei” is the name of an article by Alexander Borovsky about Mehrdad Khataei’s collection exhibited in Sophia Contemporary Gallery, London. A Persian translation of this article is available in rokhdadhonar.com.
- Mehrdad Khataei has been interviewed by rokhdadhonar website about the general atmosphere of his previous works, now available on the website, and a second interview about his new collection will be published after the end of the exhibition.
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