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The Untranslatable Words of Love / مشمش قلبي

Single-channel video, 20’25’’, 2018

Shortlisted for the Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA) 2018

The work stems from an experimental place: both visual and verbal languages are inconsistently ‘at stake’. Yet, despite the fact that the video is segmented into 4 chapters, it’s strenuous to follow its development––there is no desire to weave a coherent narrative. Moreover, each of the chapters feels as if it aspires to become a separate video-work by itself. There are many distinguished characters featuring throughout the video, but two of them, however, are aptly considered protagonists: the hart (deer) and the grey heron. That is due to their recurring appearances and because of the dual role they play simultaneously; on the one hand, each is a captured object, or a mere character, but on the other, they are also witnesses of the events’ chronicle. Formally, the work is influenced by Franz Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis (1915). Yet it doesn’t consider metamorphosis as a state of physical transformation only, but rather as a means of physical movement between spaces and progression in time. The work also hankers to deliver a visual experience where the personal/private and the political/collective are firmly intertwined, and finally, to challenge both the use and viewing of (still and moving) images and their (semantic) translations at once.

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