Remember Me, Lying on Your Sides

Performance
Filming by Jakub Bobrowski & M Hasnan Habib
4 min and 17 sec
Produced in Espoo, 2016
Presented in SOAK group show & Azad Gallery, Tehran, 2018
Thing (-ing) series*

 

“Indeed, I am the one who is created out of the essence of clay, then placed as a drop of semen in a firm resting place, then changed from semen into a leechlike mass, then from a leechlike mass into a fetus lump, then from fetus lump into bones, then my bones were clothed with flesh. I have been measured precisely and then have been brought forth as quite a different being. After living for a while I will die and most surely will be raised to life again on the day of resurrection and will be faced with what I have put forward by then.” (Quran (23:12- 23:16))

This piece has been presented in the SOAK group exhibition in April 2016 in Helsinki for the first time. SOAK was the first edition of the project Occupation of De-contextualized Spaces for Contemporary Art and took place on a  boat in Kalasatama harbor. In this piece, I try to roll a hefty and wobbly mass of a big black plastic bag filled with cold water to the end of a corridor. When I get there, I stab the bag with a knife and try to empty it using the weight of my body.

*Thing(-ing) is a state of interaction with objects in which the interpretive mind is set aside and things are considered solely by their objectness, materiality, and functional potentials. What is most intended in the process of thing (-ing) is not necessary to achieve a definite and predetermined result, but is the real and conscious experience of the interaction between mind /body and object/ matter. It is a phenomenological and creative encounter that somehow enables me to be in the moment through physical engagement with objects.