Place

Aliyar Rasti
June 08  —  July 06, 2018
Pasio

Installations place the unreliable nature of art in front of its predetermined goals. It is where the media go beyond their definite forms, depicting the multifariousness and distress of the contemporary man.

With experiences in different media, such as video art, short film, and photography, Aliyar Rasti has made another attempt at creating an installation. In Pasio’s narrow space, an appealing image of an arid, industrial land, abstracted from its former condition, immediately comes into view. However, as the viewer encounters the installation, the possibility of starring at it for too long is eliminated, which is obviously the transcendental and deconstructive characteristic of the diverse forms of the installation. Pasio’s floor is covered with artificial turf. Two mirrors facing each other, create the possibility of infinite number of reflections. The mirrors that go up to the ceiling, encompass the space by infinitely recurring images. The outside wall is also green like the Pasio’s floor. Three trees are standing outside and sounds from nature is heard.

In his installation, Aliyar Rasti is exploring and rethinking the concept of nature, putting it against the context and time that it is trying to represent. Nature is not so natural anymore. It is as though life on earth has been up against the history of civilization, overcome by man on the path to progress. In a sense, nature does not exist anymore, for if nature can be overcome, why should we place it against modern life and demand peace from it? Nature is a word that implies the unraveling and taming of life’s mystery on earth through modernization. Even jungles have become demystified as a place for recreation, losing their antagonistic, problematic dimension. The image singlehandedly reveals and highlights the contradictions and tensions of the installation. The land, whose use has been changed, seems to be waiting for something. Now another question comes to mind. Doesn’t urban development mean the destruction of cities? What distinguishes disaster from development? The destruction/construction dichotomy that is characteristic of cities is now applied to nature. Our contemporary nature in metropolises is modernization’s idealized representation of progress. It is the very image that covers up destruction, making everything look equalized and coherent. This relentless progression has brought nature to the cities, and inevitably to the sight of human beings.

Pasio is a spot that exists on the thin line between possibility and impossibility. It is the meddling of the captured nature in our private lives and with mass production apartments that have swallowed up the citizens without them knowing. In the installation, the liveliness of nature and the dullness that results from the contradictions that from it are accompanied by sounds. The dullness, however, can be on the threshold of bigger things to come.

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