Months after the coronavirus pandemic showed signs of ebbing, Zahra Yazdani began scouting for locations in Delhi that would become the set for her new work based on alternative photography.
"It was the end of 2020," recalls Yazdani, an Iranian visual artist who lives in Tehran. "I found two locations in Delhi," adds the artist, whose recent works straddle spaces and ideas between Iran and India.
Yazdani converted the two locations into sites for her new work and sent out an open call inviting performers to pose for her camera. Three years later, Yazdani's first solo show in India is ready to extend her experimental photography practice to the next level.
Scripted Selves: Sutures of Signs and Symbols, which opened at the Latitude 28 gallery in the national capital on January 24, continues the artist's practice of using 18th century photographic methods to aid her experiments on truth and reality.
In her new show, Yazdani mounts photography works created using analogue camera and gelatin silver printmaking technique, a handmade process practiced by alchemists and photographers two centuries ago.
Part of the set is a surgery room, the artist's tool to perforate the ideas of the body through experimental photography. "I find the vocabulary around old photography methods interesting," says Yazdani.
The slitting and slashing of photography prints in a dark room became akin to a surgery room where similar tools are used to cut the body. For Yazdani, the process of cutting was an aggression happening to the body. "Not a hard aggression, but a soft aggression because it is happening with photography," she says. "It is not like somebody is cutting somebody else's body."
"But if you can experience in a very mild way, it is a kind of excavation through the body through the tools," explains the artist, who began working with old photography practices nearly a decade ago after earning a degree in painting at the Soree University in Tehran.
Yazdani, who began her career as a painter, moved to alternative photography after finding the medium responsive to her work in documenting reality and fiction. "I was thinking about wanting to do something about using the techniques of the early camera," she says. "I realised that I can use its ability to interfere in the process of photography. You can just cut a part of the body and paste it into something else while you are doing photography. As if the camera is an assistance to you doing all these cut and paste and 'dismantling' bodies."
Scripted Selves: Sutures of Signs and Symbols, which has the artist map the body's capacity for feelings through photography prints on glass, and videos, transports the viewer into an imaginary realm of a world between an operating space and a photography studio.
"The exhibition space is inspired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York's ambitious 1955 photography exhibition, The Family Man. It set a benchmark for photography exhibitions in the world," says Manan Shah, who has curated Scripted Selves: Sutures of Signs and Symbols in a space that resembles the black room of a photography studio with hanging prints.
The first from her family to pursue art, Yazdani, who admires the works of Iranian-American artist Reza Alhosseini and famous Iranian artist Farideh Lashai, exhibited her last solo show based on alternative photography, Forbidden Lands, in Iran in 2018. "The main concept is the body for most of the works I have done," says Yazdani, who was inspired by the progressive works of Lashai.
Forbidden Lands, some works from which was exhibited in a group show at the Latitude 28 two years ago, explored the border between painting and photography through images of performing bodies on top of landscapes of Tehran, most of them found footage.
"It was like a kind of documenting your mindset," says Yazdani, who collaborated with Indian artist Ashish Sahoo during the pandemic for Project Blink, an online art project that invited people to play a popular card game of Iran online as storytelling. "Other than documenting the reality around you, I was gathering photos of landscapes and using performative arts to create a mixture of landscape that doesn't exist because it is created through these experiments," she adds. "Everything happens through experiments with photos for me and slowly they find their own stories. Then it becomes fiction."
It did become fiction for Yazdani when she was completing her Iran-India collaborative show, "Scripted Selves: Sutures of Signs and Symbols". An artist book, which she calls "visual fiction", is part of Yazdani's new solo show. The book, which is not displayed in the exhibition, is a 176-page book in Farsi with images from the process and text by Iranian writer Alborz Zahedi called Headless Eye.
Scripted Selves: Sutures of Signs and Symbols by Zahra Yazdani, Latitude 28 gallery, Delhi (January 24-February 29)
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