Babel, HD video, 2019, 8'
For this film, Meggy Rustamova invited her mother from Assyrian origin to name all the words she still remembers in her native tongue the Assyrian, a Neo-Aramaic language. Speakers of Assyrian are descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Northern Mesopotamia, currently known as Iraq. Assyrian, alongside other modern Aramaic languages, is a disappearing and endangered language. Babel brings together diverse layers of human life, from ageing to dementia, migration and the inevitable loss of language and identity alongside the individual and collective heritage.
Light Displacement, video stills, 2018
The starting point for this film were the many attempts to photograph a tree in Hiroshima, Japan. Aspects of war, escapism and fear are expressed in this audio-visual trip. The atomic bomb in Japan and the current nuclear threat between the US and North Korea is translated into the white, overexposed photographs, which fade into complete 'white-out' in the film. Although this place is loaded by the history of the bomb, this gesture of capturing a simple tree is an expression to the reconstruction and modernisation of a once demolished place. In sync this lonesome tree could be standing anywhere, whether it's in Brussels, London or Paris. Simultaneously the repeated efforts of capturing the tree as it naturally looks – with the beautiful sunlight and the variety of green colours – expresses the impossibility of perfectly capturing reality in a photograph. One can read this film as a politicisation of aesthetics, where beauty is harmonised with truth.
Green black out, video still, 2014-2017
Green black out is an essay film on photography. It makes use of slowly moving photographs to develop a narrative. Most photographs originate from the cost of the Black Sea, and were taken with a disposable camera on the artists voyage to her birth country. When developing the film, almost all the pictures turned out to be green or covered with a layer of green opacity. On some of these green faded images a figure or landscape emerges. Others are completely overshadowed with a green darkness covering every possible reading of the image. These images mirror the search for (hi)stories, a necessity to reveal a narrative and the construction of an image procreated from boundless fantasy and memory. The film wishes to trigger the viewers own experiences with fading blurred images, remembrance and ideal. This work aims to reveal what the thin line between what one wishes to remember and what reality is and what it means in this era of rapidly appearing and disappearing images.
L'invitation au voyage, HD video, 12'50", 2014 (video still)
Meggy Rustamova’s film Invitation to the voyage / L’invitation au voyage (2014), which derives its title from a poem by Baudelaire, is a suggestive examination of the potential of photography to tell stories (or history) and to let fact and fiction move closer together until the fuzziness of the pixels creating each photo has also taken hold of the narrative. Yellow Post-Its on selected photos promise a clarifying designation, but the words written in pencil have been erased and the path back to the time when the notes were made is now obstructed. It is the camera that guides us through the life story of the woman – her childhood, her studies, and her relationships. It zooms in on the photographs until the picture becomes grainy, focuses on details and navigates between the materiality of the photographs themselves and the content that they communicate. But are these really documents of a lived past, coherent images that add up to recount a biography? Or is it exactly these individual and simultaneously universal aspects that inevitably make them witnesses to a story that could even be completely invented? Is the spoken text a parallel narrative moving along visual coordinates or is it an autonomous level that is simply being superimposed on the images? Nothing of what is said can be read directly in the pictures themselves. The text behaves more like a transparent sheet placed over the individual photos. The picture is still there but its sharpness is reduced in favor of the context in which it appears. The process that Roland Barthes called the ‘studium’ – the cognizant approach to a photograph that is able to extract cultural and socio-historical meaning from the image and as part of this cultural perception allows the information stored in the image to find its way into one’s consciousness – is still valid. Otherwise we would not be convinced that we could find traces of the spoken text in the pictures. But what Barthes regards as the decisive noeme of photography, the ‘that-has-been’ of an unalterable link to the past, gradually dissolves during the imaginative journey into this particular past.
Text: Vanessa Joan Müller, Curator and Head of Dramaturgy at Kunsthalle Wien, 2014
Text: Vanessa Joan Müller, Curator and Head of Dramaturgy at Kunsthalle Wien, 2014
Waiting for the secret, HD Video, Single Channel, Color, Sound, 6', 2014
OV Esperanto, ST English
Ed. 5 + 2 AP
OV Esperanto, ST English
Ed. 5 + 2 AP
In Waiting for the secret, Meggy Rustamova questions our relation to the image. An image invariably evokes a longing for meaning; we want to unlock its secret. The fact that this secret always refers to language does not make things easier. Even though language may well introduce resting places, it does not guarantee stability. Rather, Rustamova’s use of Esperanto illustrates how the ideal of a reliable, transparent language, which is politically neutral and transcends any ambiguity, still fails to stabilize meaning. When the subtitles suddenly disappear, we have to make do with sounds which may sound familiar, but which keep their meaning shrouded in mystery. With her slow camera and voice-over in Esperanto, Rustamova whets our appetite for what there is to come; she leads us to details, zooms in on what is ambiguous, and exploits the narrative potential of the photographic image, even though this does not add much in the way of coherence. Despite the expectation inherent in the title, we discover that the secret of the image cannot be uncovered. The viewer is the hand that longingly reaches for the chair, or rather, the secret is the mirror of our desire. Rustamova creates time, space, and, thus, movement. As in the encounter with the work of Caspar Friedrich, the sublime background makes us receptive to the narrator’s reflections, about how desire and secret are intertwined. Gently, the camera continues to explore the image, and we keep still when we reach the solitary man facing the vastness. The narrator, however, underlines how this man is not lost in the face of the sublime state, but how lens, frame and technology facilitate this relationship. The narrative seduction of the image is at its most powerful here. In the encounter with the character, the narrator cannot refrain from including herself in the image, and through technology, to reinvent access to intersubjectivity. The man writes to her, speaks to her. For a moment, the viewer is seduced to be drawn into this intimacy; but soon we understand that we were never invited in the first place. In Rustamova’s case, however, this does not lead to a collapse of meaning; the subtitles quickly return and the playful interaction with the viewer is resumed: “Can you see the village? Can you see the plastic bag moving, yes moving in the wind?” We are invited to explore the secret further, or to create one for ourselves.
In Waiting for the secret, the crush of the sublime and technological solipsism clear the way for a playful invitation to rediscover intersubjectivity between the narrative folds of image and language.
Text: Petra Van Brabandt, 2015
In Waiting for the secret, the crush of the sublime and technological solipsism clear the way for a playful invitation to rediscover intersubjectivity between the narrative folds of image and language.
Text: Petra Van Brabandt, 2015
(dis)Location, HD video, single channel, color, sound, 16:9, 11' 44", 2013 (Video stills)
The video (dis)Location focuses on the dynamic between audience and author, language, interpretation, the duality between reality and fiction, storytelling and visual narration. (dis)Location deals with stories, personal and historical identity, manners of documentation, subtle politics and linguistic variety in narration. The video gives an insight into a personal history without ever loosing sense of the universality. There is a lot of fiction and interpretation in the way reality is perceived and (dis)Location tries to investigate when this occurs, why and how to deal within this context.
(dis)Location is part of the collection and distribution program of Argos, Centre for Media and Art, Brussels.
This film is made possible thanks to a contribution by Kaaitheater, Brussels for Performatik 2013.
This film is made possible thanks to a contribution by Kaaitheater, Brussels for Performatik 2013.
M.A.M. (My Assyrian Mother), Video, single channel, color, sound, 4', 2009-10 (Video still)
'M.A.M. (My Assyrian Mother)' is a double portrait of mother and daughter. The short film starts as a silent portrayal of two similarly dressed woman, obviously related, and differenced in age. Suddenly a discussion develops about the framing and the positioning in the setting. The camera continues filming, while the artist realises that not the departing idea is important (a silent double portrait), but what arises from this new conversation.
This performance is central to how we understand facets of identity such as gender, race, and ethnicity. People alter their bodies, hair, and clothing to align with or rebel against social conventions and to express messages to others around them. Here gender and nationality is explored through representations of the body in the creative process. This film is depicting an universal parent-child relationship, in this case a mother-daughter conversation, in a playful almost comic way, which is understood internationally.
This performance is central to how we understand facets of identity such as gender, race, and ethnicity. People alter their bodies, hair, and clothing to align with or rebel against social conventions and to express messages to others around them. Here gender and nationality is explored through representations of the body in the creative process. This film is depicting an universal parent-child relationship, in this case a mother-daughter conversation, in a playful almost comic way, which is understood internationally.