Me series @ Ghazel. 1997-2008
- GHAZEL, Me series, 1997-2008.
Dans Me, série d’autoportraits vidéo tragico-burlesques, Ghazel se filme dans de courtes séquences, toujours vêtue d’un tchador. Le tissu noir, représentation métonymique de la femme iranienne, devient progressivement un principe graphique liant les différentes saynètes entre elles.
Entre humour corrosif et poésie, detournement et transgression, association du texte à l’image, jeu subtil du champ et du hors champ, l’artiste, à travers des gestes comiques, répétitifs, désespérés, explore son identité multiple, son « autre moi ». En « suspension entre deux mondes », – chacun « tenant lieu de référence et de maison », Ghazel réinvente son univers. « Je suis une étrangère dans ces deux mondes – l’Occident et l’Iran – et c’est mon monde à moi que je révèle » (Ghazel, « Moi » in Michket Krifa, Regards persans. Iran, une révolution photographique, 2001, Paris Musées). La silhouette de l’artiste devient figure fantomatique, sondant les écrans comme le temps.
— Ghazel was born in Teheran in 1966. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes and the Paul Valery University in Montpellier. She currently lives in Paris. She if famous all over the world for her performances, video pieces and installations focusing on migration and the awareness of self and other. Her work also centres around the state of being ‘in-between’ two cultures and nomadic existence. In her most well-known work, the Me series, she is able to combine the ways traditional female gender roles are regarded and assigned in her home country of Iran with an Eurocentric view on the women of this primarily Muslin country – a view she experienced in Western Europe.
In the series of performances entitled Me, the artist can be seen engaging in diverse sports and leisure activities, such as ice skating, boxing, skiing and sunbathing, while wearing a traditional chador. She threreby contrasts the physical mobility of actions carried out in public space associated with the (western) cult of the body with the other extreme of the limited physical mobility of wearing a chador and the underlying, religiously motivated (Eastern) concepts of conceiling the female body from public view. Ghazel regards these performances as self-portraits, in which she uses irony to depict herself as a person absurdity torn between two cultures.
