In this work, artist Nava T. Barazani constructs an episode using a series of collages that converge to a single theatrical unit. Images fluctuate between flashes of personal memories from the past and an absurd, fractured, ongoing present reality subject to constant fluctuation.
Through an Ars-poetic gesture that entails ripping, wounding, concealing, repairing, dismantling, and reassembling old papers and magazines and then pasting these onto faded surfaces, Barazani creates new compositions that splice together layers of the past with the awakening, ever-changing present. Her materials, drawn from the fields of design, fashion, old literature and journalism, are blended together as chance images piled one atop the other into a densely layered surface. In a continuous stream unfolding from the depths of time, these staged images collapse and gather themselves anew within cracked urban landscapes or boundless private rooms. Anonymous figures – some documented and some fabricated – emerge as weightless, caught in perpetual motion between falling and flight, in a space that defies gravity. Their facial expressions suggest a dissolving inner dialogue, leaving only the delicate echo of a missing voice. Objects with an antique appearance, such as a vacant armchair, a dresser and background pictures, are scattered here and there, serving as a Greek chorus of sorts: a hushed vocal exhalation of existential being. Here they form a tonal and thematic echo of Paolo Sorrentino’s cinematic style, which explores memory and dream from the perspective of “nothingness” that lacks any defined time, while his heroes observe and contemplate the vicissitudes of their lives.
In a space in which repressed memory clashes with a fragile reality that has lost its footing and is unraveling like a disintegrating circus, sane existence hangs in the balance. United by a common fate and seeking a foothold, the dismantled picture that Barazani provides is not merely cynical or critical but rather an episodic and existential alienation. In a fragile, open and sometimes grotesque manner, scraps of paper move between remnants of the past and the emerging present, offering the viewer the possibility of witnessing that which cannot be expressed in words.
Avital Katz
Exhibition Curator
