Stills from Italian Studies, Installation, 2004 - Courtesy Elisabeth Kaufmann


Italian Studies, Installation view, 2004

shahryarnashat.com
Italian Studies is Shahryar Nashat's latest and most ambitious work. During his one-year residency at the Swiss Institute in Rome, 1975 born artist went through the audio-visual archive of the "Archivio del Movimento Operaio di Roma" (the Worker's Archive) and gathered all kind of images dealing with the expression of repression by and in the history of the Italian police system.

Why Italy?: "Italy is an interesting example from which we can understand the dangers of any kind of ideological extremism, thus being right or left". He avoids the accusation of a certain political ideology, creating for himself the possibility to explore the different ways of legitimate danger in contemporary society in a broader range. "Italian Studies" will enhance a very prevailing aspect of our contemporary society: the paradoxal transformation of the social need of protection into a vulgar act of repression exerted by the entity in charge of the order and in possession of the physical power. It is about the violent control of political, social and cultural freedom. By re-editing the archive's material and representing it in a new way, Shahryar Nashat forces the spectator to re-think critically what he has just seen.

The second one-man-show of Shahryar Nashat at Elisabeth Kaufmann will be composed of different autonomous works that assembled together (for the occasion of the show) form an installation: Five red varnished wood panels with incrusted LCD screens, on which superimposed images will be played. A sound piece will be aired in the Gallery and through headphones. Passages from letters written by members of the Italian "Resistenza" before being executed will be copied and mounted on the walls. Light red-filtered (neons and windows) form the fourth part of this installation.

Shahryar Nashat says: "I am suspicious from the way artists use found footage today. I mean that there are a lot of works using media clips that don't go far enough away from a simple appropriation, and then expecting that since artists and art-viewers are all supposed to be leftist, there is an assumption if this understanding that we can't think the artist agrees with the media, so they must be critical, even if there is no element in the work that shows this. That is the reason why I think it is fundamental to be responsible and to take firm formal decisions of re-presentation in order not to navigate in a semi-denunciative environment where the artist's position is vague and senseless".