A platform for Tamaas
Notes from the editors on the first issue of Tamaas, Time and Movement
The first theme of Tamaas is Time and Movement. In our selection process we looked for projects that challenge what can be defined as movement, movements of time and times of movement through various mediums such as text, moving image and photography. The first issue of Tamaas owes itself to our friends whose presence contains a form of resistance toward organism of museums and visibility modes of institutional settings. We thought about our communities who may have never seen each other but in an imaginary juncture we would parallelize their writing, work and modes of being. Therefore juxtaposing them with one another gave each and all of them a new home and one space to breathe together.
Farhad Yassavoli’s ongoing photo project titled “losses” illustrates his family as they sleep, nap or casually rest throughout the day and depicts their motionless bodies occupying, sharing and repeating the domestic space. Yassavoli’s photos adjacent to Jessica Harvey’s patient, delicate and radically faithful photographic study of the gray variations of Iceland’s sky create a repetitive imaginary juxtaposition described by an unusual sense of perseverance. Yassavoli’s photographed bodies are in the process of becoming the gradations of gray, as if these condensed multiples of reticent bodies are transported via these gray screens as depicted in “one hundred days of gray”.
Niloofar Nedaei’s disfigured protagonists and their fragile amnestic states resembling Tennessee William’s turbulent personas in “که خون در بَر٬ دَر گاه” has a parallel dreamscape to Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach’s time capsulating, softly universal and existential writing. Hickie’s intimate work invites the reader to release their emotional and personal frenzy trapped in routines of the everyday. Ruslana Lichtzier’s “6 x 9”, a collection of short stories of prose and poetry, all of which magically visualizes the wandering of vocabularies, reflections of an emigrate, a lover and a writer. Lichtzier’s “6 x 9” in contact with Finlay Clark’s “Tertiary” is similar to solving a puzzle of ponderings made out of momentary exigencies. This puzzle requires the reader’s attention and human care in order to be listened, read and resolved through the process of a conceptual touch. Clark’s work seduces one’s attention through a whispering compassion and an intimate softness provoked by his delicate consideration of time.
Orr Menirom and Rambod Vala have contributed to our first issue of Tamaas with moving image works. Menirom’s “The Vanishing Monuments”, similar to the path of storytelling in Vala’s “Dey Night” tells a story as the narrator maps the space by walking, but instead of a backward walking as Vala does, she uses a reversed language. Rami George’s “untitled(understanding arabs)” collage with found photographs and text creates a sophisticated and mysterious broken narrative, weaving together fractured family and collective memories within the turmoil and upheavals of history of Lebanon. The storyteller in Daniel Spangler’s “Tunnel (from In-house Engineers)” narrates a story of border crossings and passport control within a dystopic setting in a land whose geographical location is unknown to us. Spangler and George’s work adjacent to one another become complementary narratives, one set in a conceived and fragmented image of Lebanon while the other unfolds as the car moves in an endless tunnel toward the unknown.
Our platform of exchange opens with the turn of every season. The first issue, “Time and Movement” made possible with contributions from ten participating artists is now open. We invite our readers to send us textual, visual, auditory and moving image material in response to either of these paired works. In your responses please do indicate which pair you are responding to and there are no limits in the number of submissions. Before publishing our next issue we will update the journal with the responses to the published works in the previous issue.
Our hope is to connect distant modes of being and making, with the hope of being felt, seen and remembered differently. And in doing so, we open the journal to get submissions from our readers in response to the published projects. Please write to us and be in Tamaas, تماس, επαφή.
Sanaz Sohrabi + Marina Miliou Theocharaki, the editors of Tamaas.