Me, 1997-2000 is a video installation on three monitors, each video comprising a dozen short scenes, interspersed with autobiographical texts in both French and English, which throw light on the context. In these videos, Ghazel, dressed in a chuddar or veil, re-enacts scenes from daily life either in the quarter of her childhood in northern Teheran, or in modern settings such as offices, gymnasiums, supermarkets, etc. Using the minimum in equipment, the artist filmed herself with an HI8 video camera, mounted on a tripod. The videos are in black and white except where colour is essential. Using fixed shots, each sequence is delimited precisely in space and time, characteristic of the old, comic, silent movie. The short duration of the shots, often merely a matter of seconds, is due to the ban on filming in the street in Iran, but is just long enough for the viewer to grasp the essence. Most of the scenes underline the paradoxes experienced by the artist between Near-Eastern customs and modern Western life. Wearing a chuddar makes some of the activities carried out by the artist tricky to perform, even quite absurd, such as gymnastics, sunbathing or swimming, all while totally clothed; there are various other examples such as trying to dance like Michael Jackson or marching in military fashion. Other sketches show her rolling herself up in a Persian rug (People Had to Find Amazing Ways to Sneak out of Their Country), removing handcuffs from her wrists (I Guess I Prefer Bracelets) or circling a small globe (Wanna Go Around the World), all of which convey further the situation of Iranians, especially women and their wish for emancipation. Others express a poetic distortion of the chuddar and remain more enigmatic. Presented as installations, the actions are not synchronized, which helps link the random images. In choosing to multiply and alternate the actions that are so distinct from one another, there is no question of either denunciation or tunnel vision. She tackles eminently political questions through apparently light-hearted actions using derision, her favourite tool. This first series of Me represents for Ghazel a sort of personal diary in home movie mode that she adds to on each visit back to Iran. The project encompasses her “parallel life”, and develops at the same pace as her life as an artist in the West. Whereas the first Me were compiled directly from her memories, the videos have since developed as a result of her various places of residence, and from the projection of her future identity as an artist, which is evident in the following series of Me, commenced in 2000. The whole autobiographical project Me portrays the multiple identities of Ghazel, who settled in France in 1986, and the difficulty she finds in being caught between two cultures: “My work is foreign whether I am in the West or in Iran.”

Marianne Lanavère

Translated by Diana Tamlyn