Raha said:
“My body responds to the trauma in their body, it travails when their body is beaten, it pains with the shotted bullets, it feels the lost eyes of them in the street. This is my body, with all the pain, with the impressions it holds.”
“The Archive Performance Series is a photograph series, that conveys my isolation, and hopelessness, in the unsettling presence which surrounded me. The blurry figures, and the ghostly presence, bring the claustrophobia and unsettlement of my body into the work, which is presented in two ways. Papers echo the movement of the body and carpet in the space, and the dissolving figures in the animated photos bring the body’s disappearance into the work.”
“My body responds to the trauma in their body, it travails when their body is beaten, it pains with the shotted bullets, it feels the lost eyes of them in the street. This is my body, with all the pain, with the impressions it holds.”
“The Archive Performance Series is a photograph series, that conveys my isolation, and hopelessness, in the unsettling presence which surrounded me. The blurry figures, and the ghostly presence, bring the claustrophobia and unsettlement of my body into the work, which is presented in two ways. Papers echo the movement of the body and carpet in the space, and the dissolving figures in the animated photos bring the body’s disappearance into the work.”
Performer / Artist - Raha Alipourfard
Art Direction - Chen Wenwei
Art Direction - Chen Wenwei
I first encountered this work from a position of photographic detachment. As its collaborator and documenter, I was drawn to the force of the gestures but remained initially unable to read their necessity. The work resisted immediate legibility.
My understanding shifted over time. What I had first taken as performance gradually came to register as a bodily negotiation with memory, displacement, and proximity to home. Rather than presenting political experience directly, the work allowed it to surface through repetition, endurance, blur, and partial withdrawal.
What continues to stay with me is its treatment of the body as something neither fully present nor fully absent. Through reduced means and deliberate restraint, the work holds figuration at the threshold of disappearance, giving form to silence, pressure, and unresolved historical experience.
My understanding shifted over time. What I had first taken as performance gradually came to register as a bodily negotiation with memory, displacement, and proximity to home. Rather than presenting political experience directly, the work allowed it to surface through repetition, endurance, blur, and partial withdrawal.
What continues to stay with me is its treatment of the body as something neither fully present nor fully absent. Through reduced means and deliberate restraint, the work holds figuration at the threshold of disappearance, giving form to silence, pressure, and unresolved historical experience.