“I Was About to Be Them/There” (2023) is comprised of a video projector hung on the corner wall facing an assemblage of 51 mirror shards that range from 90 x 80 cm to 20 x 24 cm. The irregular shapes resemble mosaic tiles. The installation is about 5 x 5 x 2.5 meters cubed. The mirror shards float in the same plane, suspended by thin threads knitted together into a net attached to the ceiling.
The bigger fractured mirror pieces are higher and closer together. The smaller ones are lower and farther apart, giving the visual effect of a large mirror falling and shattering. Some projected light passes through the empty spaces between the shards and falls onto the walls behind. The mirrors move slightly, which causes the projected video fragments to also move. The result is a chaotic, confusing space that may cause some viewers to experience slight disorientation and dizziness.
The video (5:35, looped) is a montage of recent protest videos in Iran interwoven with scenes of my daily life in Regina: cooking, vacuuming, answering emails, or having a coffee. The Regina clips use a first-person point of view. Fades mimic the opening and closing of my eyes. When I open my eyes, I see/the lens shows my ordinary life. When I close them, the screen fades to black, and then a new video of Iran plays as if in my head. My voice-over narrates my paradoxical feelings of living safely in Canada while horrifying events unfold in my homeland. While physically removed from my hometown, it is all I can think about mentally.
I created“I Was About to Be Them/There” to represent a metaphoric space of distance and confusion. I want to share my feelings of being lost due to being so far away during the civil unrest in Iran in 2022 and 2023[1]. I have simultaneously felt far from everything yet close. As Iran is nine hours and thirty minutes ahead of Regina, my second day begins at night. At first, my concern for my family was urgent; but soon the experience was surreal. I had two lives. I felt present but removed, neither here (in Canada) nor there (in Iran). My life was a jumble of fragments. “I Was About to Be Them/There” shapes and shares my fragments. It offers a bodily experience. Viewers enter the space and see themselves reflected in a sheet of mirror fragments hanging from the ceiling. The video clips also appear in the fragments and are reflected on the walls. Moving images from the projectors also spill past the mirrors and onto the opposite wall. The mirrors move with the slightest touch and shimmer reflections of the projected imagery. This creates a sense of confusion that I wanted my viewers experience.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/irans-protests-crushed-mahsa-aminis-death-still-felt-year-later-world-rcna105003