(2008)

Video installation (colour, sound)

mixed media, dimensions variable

Runtime: 6' 38'' (loop)

Courtesy Barbad Golshiri

Produced in cooperation with ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; technical site management: Matthias Ossmann, Werner Hutzenlaub, Ronny Haas, Dirk Heesakker, Rainer Gabler, Gisbert Laaber, Raphael Dobler, Manfred Schmieder, Helge Grey.

The exterior projection of  shows eight young women in Iranian school uniforms standing in a row before a blue backdrop. The rocking chair in the interior is a play on an unadorned “throne,” and the old television set shows a 6-year-old professional mourner weeping bitterly. The women slowly close their eyes and dissolve into the blue of the curtain but their feet remain on the ground. In synchronization with the girls closing their eyes, the child's image fades to black and the chair rocks on.

 reflects the role of the media, television in particular; how it has in general, and in a motherly way, substituted religion and particularly the Pastor, and how religion, once considered as “the opium of the masses”, has become the opium of a religious media-based state and its masses. The Persian word for curtain, pardé, carries equally the meanings of screen, hymen and shroud. The blue pardé refers both to the blue box technique and various mise-en-scènes used in Iran’s political visual system of representation.

The installation is oriented towards south east.