Artists Ali Zanjani
My work has almost always been created using film frames from cinematic, educational and news film archives. By appropriating these images, I’ve reexamined the historical cycle of the photographic image. Photography was the visual and technological foundation of cinema and later television. Now, abandoned cinematic and television archives have been collected and recycled to the photographic cycle. In my exhibitions, I’ve come to witness the various reactions to and interpretations by viewers of these “still” images. Despite their variety, they’ve all been independent and free interpretations of the image far from its original context of a narrative film where a series of images draw the viewer’s mind towards an ultimate ending and conclusion.
– Ali Zanjani
As in his Pray (2010) or Just Between Us (2012), this new series aims to recontextualize the subjects in the footage by carefully selecting specific film frames – in this case an old physics film demonstrating the effect of positively charged electrons on a young girl’s hair – and removing them from their original context.
This source of this “Static” force however, remains concealed within all thirty-two frames selected and the young girl’s state never reaches a moment of discharge enduring her to remain in this state of pregnancy indefinitely.
