Shahin Afrassiabi • New Values • 17.03.–21.04.2012

A minimal and unobtrusive wooden structure runs through the gallery. It delimits an abstract, rigorously geometric framework and somehow acts as if it were a recollection, reminding us of a modernist utopia, the clarity of vision, the vocabulary of minimal forms and simplicity that composed its substance. By means of available, rough materials and tools, the matter itself and its quality emerge before the form. The work’s materiality is the prominent characteristic: it defines, in equal measure all the elements disseminated therein. Basing the process on the possibilities disclosed by the use of provisional means, a formally equivocal whole is assembled foregrounding the signs of labour and quality, in both the ethical and economic sense.

This work is in a constructive dialogue with painting, its materiality and image. In addition it is a matter of  interpolating (in mathematics interpolating signifies the insertion of an intermediate value or term into a series by estimating or calculating it from surrounding known values) apparently disconnected forms of life, the structure and the photograph.

The photographs feature solitary figures and details of ordinary movements in familiar, but probably unknown, settings. The scenes originate in street views taken from the Internet, easily accessible and widely known. They are firstly visualized on a computer screen and then photographed using a basic digital camera. The final result is an overlap of levels that produce depth while recording a stratification of details and imperfections. Somewhere between the places in which the elements on show arise and the processing they subsequently undergo, a gap between accessibility and distance forms and grows.

The question, as I see you have alluded to, is the question of what one is looking at: whether it is the figure, the computer screen, the dust on the screen. I think you mentioned distance. I would also add duration. 

Finally, what we see is the result of progressive ‘differing’, in terms of both space and time.