WHAT TO DO?  (2012)

What To Do? presents a 7 video screen installation of an engagement with cultural experiences of the Middle East through the compulsive male habit of handling religious prayer beads or tasbih (what we in the West refer to as “worry beads”) in response to the oscillating conditions of being worried or unworried about major life issues and concerns in the region.

Catalogue essayist James Scarborough says of What To Do?, “Nasr ‘draws a bead’ on religion’s supposed ability to effect gender equality and world peace. For such a simple and elegant installation, the piece is incredibly rich in associations and diagnoses. Subtle and savage, accommodating and incisive, it functions on the distinction between the secular and non-secular use of beads, mediated through the offices of another sacred space, an art gallery.”[1]

In another essay Pippa Milne describes this work accordingly: “Social, political and intellectual forces that shape contemporary society are inevitably fraught with confusion and uncertainty. Questions are plentiful. Answers are few. In viewing What To Do? with its hands that compulsively worry away, ad infinitum, one oscillates between sensing the cyclical and infinite nature of the human condition, and a pressing sense that some decisions must be reached.”[2]

[1] James Scarborough is an art, theatre and film critic for Huffingtown Post since it began in 2010, and a former member of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle

[2] Pippa Milne lives and works in Melbourne. Writer and curator, CCP Catalogue Essay, August 2012.

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Beshkan (Breakdown)

 As a traditional form of celebration throughout Middle Eastern countries, the “Persian snap” (beshkan–بشكن) uses both hands to create a cracking/clicking sound familiar to the normal (Western ‘single-handed’) clicking or snapping of the fingers. Historically, throughout the region when there is happy news to celebrate for any family or group of people the immediate reaction is beshkan.

While this joyous ‘dance’ of double-handed finger snapping (celebrates) happiness (and a good news) in those particular cultures to the unknowing viewer this visual performance of hands and fingers might be construed as something quite the contrary (opposite), seemingly aggressive and sinister. What visually can be viewed to one culture as the (celebration) of (happiness) can conjure images from a Western (perspective) of children playing war games. Thus the inherent contradiction and ambiguity of the action can never be separated from each other.

Through her practice Nasim Nasr explores and comments on both specific and universal concerns, addressing the anima of the human condition by engaging issues of civil and social turbulence, and the challenges of articulating personal identity within a new cultural context. Her recent works articulate the complexity of identity—the individuality and the innermost-self—within this context, questioning what constitutes the boundaries of self and society, as personally experienced between the artist’s past and present homelands.

The single-channel video work Ashob: Unrest (2015), takes as its focus the recital of a passage from twentieth-century Persian author Sadegh Hedayat’s seminal text, The Blind Owl (1937). Although the image focuses only on the artist’s mouth reciting the passage, the audio soon becomes a cacophony of different languages, interweaving and competing to become a polyglot of both eloquence and confusion. While the spoken excerpt speaks of the universal experience of the psyche in flux, the barrage of voices is a reminder of the difficulty of understanding of identity across cultures.

Forty Pages contemplates personal or global history in the context of movement from one culture to another in the contemporary world, and refers to forty pages in a passport.

Each passport stamp, representing either the departure from or entering a country, is integral to one’s history of the difficulties of freedom of movement and disempowerment by country of birth and its life-boundaries. At every national border one is submissive and defenseless to officialdom. This is a potent control upon individual existence and independence, especially in the contemporary world of displacement and separation between East and West.

This gradual accumulation of stamps feels like layers upon my personal history, upon my passport photo, upon my face, its aggregation steadily evolving into an identity I no longer recognize, apart from the eyes—a transformation.

Forty Pages presents my body as a site or platform for the compilation of these stamps of the last decade of my life, and therefore part of the history of the transience of my being.

33 Beads (2018)

33 Beads engages with cultural experiences through the compulsive, predominantly male habit of handling traditional prayer and non-prayer beads (what the West refers to as “worry beads” and in the Middle East “tasbih”) in response to the fluctuating conditions of being worried or unworried about major life issues and concerns.

Social, political and intellectual forces that shape contemporary society are inevitably fraught with confusion and uncertainty. Questions are plentiful, answers are few.

The photo series 33 Beads with its double and multiple female hands compulsively mould the beads, seeking to deny their cultural meaning, presenting the question whether to keep the male tradition or break it down.

The tension between the female hands and the worrybeads suggests an unspoken metaphor, to hold on to one’s past or to let it go, sensing the cyclical and infinite nature of the human condition.