Migration, for whatever reasons driving the phenomenon, emerges today as a situation that raises questions about pre-established conditions in contemporary society. Reza Aramesh has chosen this subject for her research, working closely with images of current migratory processes and how they are reactivated when exposed to others of diverse origins. She explores the limits of representation in precise cultural contexts, which leads her, in a self-avowed quest to shock the senses, to force an encounter between images or devices from distant and different cultural shores.
This is the case of Action 213: A Taste of Austere Luminance, where she employs ancient oriental byobu, Japanese folding screens, whose panels offer the opportunity to tell a story, essaying different possible versions based on the combinations of certain images.
Contemporary political violence takes shape in the form of kneeling silhouettes cut out by Aramesh, upon which are printed scenes taken directly from conflict zones, such as Vietnam, Africa or the Middle East. Thus, each panel presents on one side a silhouette as a historical reference point, while on the other a vast utopian landscape of great natural beauty embraces everything. The folding screen, originally designed to divide up spaces or create a private area, is the resource Aramesh has chosen to split up the space, cleaving the flow of the public through the exhibition hall, and imposing upon visitors the need to choose which side of the piece they will see, which creates a border or limit. This endows the works with enormous symbolic significance, as when you are looking at the silhouettes of people subjugated by conflict, you cannot see the utopian landscapes on the other side, and vice versa. A physical frontier is created between real experience and the desire from which springs, irrevocably, the condition prompting migration. Diana B. Wechsler
