Site Overlay

Tanتَن

Sound Sculpture

Gutenberg Museum Mainz, October 2022


Previous

Next

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. 

At The Threshold

Installation for Audio and Video

3 x Klingeln! Mainz, September 2021

Once you have an obsession, you step on it at every corner.
“Sophie Calle”
People in urban cities, are immersed in a universe of small boxes on top of each other as buildings. A universe of walls, doors, and windows. But also, a universe of intercoms and doorbells in different forms, colors, and shapes, which seem to be the portal from the vastness of outside to the mystery of inside and what moves behind those walls, doors, and windows. All we are left out with are piles and piles of ever-changing name tags and buttons assigned to them. As if the city architecture bares its own interactive soundwalk. During the Covid-19 quarantine, on the peak of separation of in and out, the artist started to walk around her resident city, follow the name tags, capture them, ring the doorbells, and record the short dialogs happening at that specific moment. Capture the sound of the moment where site and space, in and out, interfere and the mystery on the other side of the portal takes an actual shape only aurally and leaves the visuality of it to the imagination. For Rockenhausen festival, a wooden gate was built with an outdoor speaker hidden in one of the sides. The photos would cover the gate. The gate would be positioned on the way from the concert halls to the next exhibition location for the audience to pass through and experience the moment while being immersed in the piles of name tags and intercoms and doorbells.

OutHere

Installation for Tape, Chair, Table, Cassette Player, Rope, Tree Stem

Soundseeing Festival Münsterland, July 2021

.
.

Previous

Next

Room is a privilege. Particularly in these days on the pandemic when a room with walls and windows, denotes a shelter from contagion, whereas homelessness poignantly reminds us of the inability to shelter from the virus. A room both separates and protects us from what is outside. While at the same time it is nothing, but a site taken out of space, made of boundary lines which define what is in and what is out. However, the terms inside and outside are not conclusive in this context. Every outside is an inside from another point of view, hence the inconclusiveness of site and space. If we draw outlines of a room on the ground and step inside the lines,

Are we still in the same space? Or are we in a new inside?

In OutHere, the spectator finds themselves facing a two-dimensional room/space outlined on the floor with duct tape. A doorway both invites them in while alerting them to the lines on the floor. Basic furniture like a bed, pillow, and blanket is outlined also with duct tape. This way the concept of the room is laid out in one dimension, but not inhabitable. In this two-dimensional floor plan, the spectator will encounter a “real”, three-dimensional chair and table, on which sits, a cassette player. This installation is placed in front of a window, outside which sees the spectator, a mirrored lay out made of white ropes in the field among the trees. Instead of a carved table and chair, there awaits two tree stems in “silence”. One room is “Inside” and the other is “Outside”. One offers you to listen and interact, but the other is only to reflect on where you are and what surrounds you, while bolding the concept of the two-dimensional room.  

Tape plays the voice of the artist describing the moment of entering the room, while moving in between the lines and limits of language. With her voice, the artist guides the participant on a poetic journey. She begins with “I am the space where I am” and finishes with “I became the space”. Instructions placed next to the cassette player, instruct the audience as participants to play and listen to her voice, pause to listen to what surrounds them and reflect, and then record their own voice narrating those reflections, to leave behind a piece that remains part of the room.

In this way the work raises the question of: “how room sounds like”

One Speaker Performance

Installation for One Speaker

Soundseeing Festival Münsterland, July 2021


Previous

Next

Physische Existenz

Physical Existence

Drei Dimentional

Three Dimensional

Aussehen wie Wahrgenommen

Appearance as Perceived

               Funktion

               Function

                                                         Klang                                                                                         Klang

                                                                                      Klang

                                              Klang                                                       Klang

                                                                                                                                Klang

                                                                                  Luft

          Klang                             

                                                                  Klang

                                                                                                                                                                                        Klang

JURWARUR ج و ر و ا ج و ر

Mixed Media Exhibition

Zweitstelle Art Gallery Mainz, April 2021

Dismantled Her…

Installation for Audio and Video

Nov 6-8,2020/ Rockenhausen Festival for New Music [Cancelled]


Previous

Next

This is the story of a dismantled woman suffering the idea of being a limited human being. Never being heard or perceived to the fullest. She hopes to be back in her mother’s womb for that was probably the last time she felt safe. This world has tared her into pieces and now she is imagining being back in the womb, feeling safe enough to tell us what she feels and sees but she is drowned in thick liquid and her words are not understandable. She is trying to reach us but all she gets is suffocation.

The artists, a middle eastern woman living the irony of safety away from home, from under the water reaches out to the audience looking at her dismantled and misplaced body parts overshadowed with audience’s reflection in the screen, while The incomprehensive words traveling via water as the medium are being transmitted to the glass by means of a transducer.

The original plan and location for this piece was an abandoned pool in Rockenhausen. The video frames would be projected at the crocked blue bottom of the empty pool, inviting the audience to enter the zone and walk around/over the video and let their shadows distort the motions and be another layer added to the visual aspects. Meanwhile four loudspeakers from each corner of the pool, filles the emptiness of it with the sounds of the woman under the water.

*This piece was supported by Ambient recordings in Munich, who granted a Hydrophone (special microphone for underwater recording) to her for two weeks, free of any charge, to support the art and the artist.

GOLOBOLBOL گل و بلبل

Installation for six channels

August 2019, Rose garden, Johannes Gutenberg University Campus


Previous

Next

Following her fascination in language, the rhythm of the words, and speech regardless of the semantics and syntax), the artist chose to use ancient Persian poetry, when she was asked to install in a rose garden on the campus. She recorded poems on the rose and the relationship between the gardener as the lover who greatly takes care of the rose. The poems were recited by one Persian male (her father) and one Persian female. While as a counterpart, verses of the same poems were recited by a Mexican male and a Korean Female to play with the rhythms of the Persian language via a foreign accent.

Persian poetry is famous for its intonation and rhythmic system, which also is one of the basis and the bedding for the rhythm in Persian traditional music.

The artist used the contrast of the native Persian speakers who could easily and correctly pronounce each word with its rhythm, counter the none-Persian speakers who although saying the right words, could not comprehend that same rhythm.

Six speakers where places in plant pots, hidden in the rose bushes, reciting the poems on the relationship between the bird (Nightingale), the Flower (Rose) and the gardener. The pots where rearranged every day during the summer school to give the composition more dynamic.

The installation was a depiction of the illustrations of the bird and the flower along the calligraphy of the poetry in Ancient Persia.

Tangled-Untangled

Installation for Two Channels and Handmade String Instrument
June 2018, Hochschule für Musik-Mainz, Germany

In 2017, as the artist was still living in Ahwaz, Iran, she could manage to obtain the permission for a one time only exhibition. For the ‘Ahwaz sound exhibition’, the artist made 6 two-string instruments with fixed pitch on the strings. On each string was a field recording of a certain part of her hometown. Audience would trigger the sounds by pulling the strings and in a manner of speaking play the town like an instrument.

As she arrived in Germany in May 2018, she was asked to exhibit at the alumni day at Mainz music school. Having to go through lots coming from Iran to Germany and leaving her roots behind, she made a bigger replica of the two-string instrument but with shifting bridges. This way the pitches did not need to be fixed on the strings and the audience would have more freedom in interacting with the instrument. 

 

.. — .- –. .. -. .

Installation for ten speakers and more

July 2019, Hochschule fur Musik-Mainz, Germany

How many factors can alternate our perception of something?
How wide does language set the frame on our perception?
Could we induce visual perception via aural input?

In this piece, the artist is placing the participants in a space where they will be facing all the questions above. It is a game of perception through induction of aural data into visual via language.

Since the end of 2018, the artist started gathering material by interviewing a broad range of subjects on describing colors: what they see when facing a particular color, how they feel about it, and more importantly what they hear when thinking about that color. The challenge though, is to describe and answer all the question without naming the color.

In the mix of this ever-growing archive are Blind people (from birth or blinded by an accident), color blind people, people with sight disorder along with people with regular sight skills; People from many different ethnic backgrounds, different ages with many different professions and life experiences.
Audience is invited to take a small light source by the entrance and enter the darkroom where the 10 loudspeakers, hanging on the walls shape a sonic hallway. A 10-channel composition of all the recorded descriptions, engages the audience’s perception. The artist somehow composed the piece based on the mixture of the colors rather than just sounds.

The composition in German was commission by hr2 in 2020 under the title ‘Rangowarang’ which in Farsi means color in color; one says that when something is intensively colorful.
The composition was also placed in a hearing station at Soundseeig festival in Muenster in 2021. This time only the female voices and both in German and English.

Ahwaz Sound-Exhibition

Installation for 6 Channels and 6 Handmade String Instruments
July 2017, Ahwaz, Iran

The way technology and urbanism moves, there will be a time no one remembered the simplest kind of sounds they used to be surrounded by before. As a small instance, Anahita used the gradually dying sounds from different spots around her home town to remind her audience of this massive neglected on-going extinction. The audience would have to play on six simple string instruments and as the result hear particular elements of Ahvaz soundscape along with the instruments sound, from different directions, projected by six speakers located around the place. Instruments were handmade, made of walnut wood. Attached to each piece three guitar string (No. 4, 5, 6), Bridges from an Iranian instrument called Santur and guitar tuners. Pick-ups were also handmade Piezzo contact microphones.