Tanتَن

For this exhibition Ghasemi Nasab has produced the installation “Tan”, a sound sculpture that reflects on a period of severe and transformative illness the artist went through in 2021. The illness marks a turning point in her artistic practice, putting a stop on her working for over 8 months, 5 of which on bedrest. Through this period, illness became a central subject, and the body, in its frailty and nun-function became a critical focus. Her body was no longer a mere tool serving artistic production. Instead, through its refusal to work, it had become a protagonist, as well as the cause, topic, and instrument of Ghasemi Nasab’s artistic production. To connect with this body the artist started to listen to herself with a stethoscope. For this piece, Ghasemi Nasab built her own microphone out of a stethoscope to hear and record her body the way it was heard by the medical profession exploring, diagnosing, and pathologizing it through illness.

Through auscultation, the artist’s ill body is rendered viscerally audible as beats, cracks, and squeaks. The playing of such bodily sounds in the gallery space, re-presents the body and externalizes what is in nature internal. In this way, Ghasemi Nasab gives the ill body a different agency not as object of the artwork but as subject of its performance. The empty mattress on the floor, from which these sounds emanate, brings the attention to the absence of the actual physical body, while sonically underlining the vulnerability of the ill body as flesh, leaky, breathing, and breaking down. Through sonic propagation in the exhibition space, this unwell body comes to resonate with the audience and other objects, thus extending itself through and with them. This piece is not so much about the body as ill body but focuses instead on the production of art by an ill body. The work reflects on the existential necessity of the body in creative practice, which in discourses is often reduced to artistic identity, its functionality assumed, but which in the work can be present in its imperfect and unwell state.