Faraz Anoushahpour

In winter of 1986 our mother writes in her diary: “To scratch the surface of a subject does not penetrate deep into the subject”. Almost three decades later, Pictures of Departure takes this entry and sets off to explore the surfaces and the scratches that linger across generations.

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beach is a recreation of a live performance originally presented at Mercer Union in Toronto in June 2018. An expanded prologue for the film Chooka, the performance used a live feed from an iPhone to project images taken while making the film, as well as material from Jacques Madvo’s archive, the original spark for the creation of the work. Paired with writing that was swapped back and forth between the artists, the work meditates on the politics of an archive, the shifting agency of different bodies in a landscape, and the challenge of asking what a complete image could be.

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In 1973, the Shah of Iran commissioned the construction of a paper factory in the lush northern province of Gilan. The arrival of heavy industry in a predominately agricultural region brought with it a series of interventions into this landscape, including the construction of modernist apartment blocks and purpose-built villas to house foreign engineers from Canada and the United States and their families. Their stay, however, came to a sudden halt in 1979 with the Iranian revolution forcing them to flee the site overnight. Chooka unfolds around the site of this factory, returning to the location 40 years after it mysteriously appeared in Jacques Madvo’s 1978 footage. Treating his archival material as a guide, the film moves through a landscape altered by industry, technology and revolution, bringing silent images from the past forward to a location caught within a perpetually uncertain present.

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The chasm between languages is explored through a photograph of a volcanic stone slice in Taiwan. As technology attempts to foster translation and understanding, it also produces new meanings.

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A faltering narrator attempts to recount a family holiday as memory — sparked by a found postcard, a family photo album, and footage from two distinct locations and spatio-temporalities (Toronto and Berlin) — summons forth a barrage of flickering images, creating psychic hiccups and firecrackers of recall.

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In July 2017 residents of the Markham suburban development of Cathedraltown awoke to find a chrome replica of a prize-winning Holstein cow, double its original size, suspended on 25-foot tall stilts in the centre of a small crescent facing their homes. The sculpture was commissioned by Cathedraltown’s developer, and donated to the City of Markham as a public art piece. The residents, however, quickly rose in opposition to a sculpture that they felt did not represent them, and negatively affected their quiet suburban community. Charity is presented as a public digital artwork produced by the National Film Board of Canada in partnership with Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto. The interactive documentary employs 360° video and photogrammetry to share a variation on the familiar interactive real estate tour –– where a house in Cathedraltown becomes a site to collect and re-narrate a community’s confrontation with a piece of public art, in turn offering a portrait of private property.

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