Decay(-ing)

Thinking through the matters of sensation, sensation of time that concerns the grand question: what is/are the ‘meaning(-s) of life” in body-prison, body-locked, lonely-body?, Iranian artist and writer Sevda Khatamian argues that while we are all being made of a “texture of Adam”, we still tend not to “forget the sunscreen”, the protection, the dermatology of our skins. For her, it is the question of our anthropocentric survival or our annihilation. But what about the bodies with no land, no sun of ‘their own’, the “no-landers”, the no-suners?

In her video installations and paintings, Sevda writes a sort of manifesto of loneliness for the pluralization of relations between matter, the human and the non-human. By feeling the geo-history of the places locally and bodily (in this case, the locality of Žeimiai) she steps away from teo- and ego- logics of patriarchal, eurocentric gaze. Cloud-watching with the smile she wonders what the identity, nationality, race is when all decay? What kind of territories are disassembled when the known social and political decays? More broadly, what can one imagine to be the lonely body without face?

Featured Works of the Exhibition:

Farmer (Ash on Dead Tree)

Lonely Place [Something Red] (Watercolor on Paper)

Local Time (Hand-written Journal and Digital Video)

Curator of the exhibition and the author of exhibition texts: Eglė Ambrasaitė
Architect of the exhibition: The Invisible Man
Guide of the exhibition: Sevda Khatamian
Img: Sevda Khatamian, Enrika Stanulevičiūtė

“Decay(-ing)” is part of the project “Invisible Man’s Cinematheque 2019: to (dis)embody”. It is partly financed by Lithuanian Council for Culture and Roberto Cimetta Fund.