“Trace” (2022, 6:31 loop) consists of a projected video diptych three meters wide and 90 cm high.
The video shows dozens of body parts. They quiver as if breathing. Each scene shows a body part tightly wrapped with fishing thread. Flesh protrudes between the bindings. At any moment, blood could run. The body parts contract and holds still. Breathing stops as if to make the body smaller, create space, and lessen the pain.
A hand and scissors enter the frame and start cutting the threads. In some places, threads snap one by one, and the body is soon free. Other threads stubbornly cling to the skin. Eventually, they detach and stretch above the sweaty, indented skin, white from the pressure, drained of their last drop of pain. It is over. The thin binds are gone. Though released the flesh is stripped by deep red lines. The marks remain; breathing labors. The body is free.
“Trace” (2022) is the performative video I made binding myself with fishing lines. I express my invisible lived experience through a visceral metaphor in these videos. I needed to express the feeling of not belonging to myself, of not having full control of my body, thoughts and feelings.
My experiences of indoctrination as a girl within the Islamic regime in Iran exemplify the use of such apparatuses of control. Every aspect of life was determined by strict, tight rules—as tight as feeling physically bound. Fitting into those rules was sometimes impossible, suffocating, and restrictive: it hurt. My body and my thoughts have been under tremendous political and sociological control for years—so much so that I have felt I am not myself anymore but pulled in multiple directions.
My artistic task with “Trace” was to search for the traces of my experience and to trace them onto my skin, making these invisible restrictions visible through embodied metaphor. Merleau-Ponty believes that “our body is our general medium for having a world, the body is essentially an expressive space.”[1] I used my body as an expressive space in “Trace”: I squeezed my body to show how it feels when someone squeezes your mind and thoughts and how irritating and damaging it can be.
If I kept the bindings on, I could face some severe damage. I cut the threads when I knew holding it one more second was impossible. This video projection serves as a form of trauma reenactment: “Individuals may actively re-enact elements of a past traumatic experience as a way to cope with and master it.”[2] I confront the viewer with imagery of pain, having re-created my mental experience physically, only this time, I am in charge—even though the deep painful impacts are still present, I attempt to free myself. I enact a trauma upon myself as an expression of my need to have control of my own body and mind at last.
[1] Levy, Michael S. “A helpful way to conceptualize and understand reenactments.” The Journal of psychotherapy practice and research vol. 7,3 (1998): 227-35. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3330499/.
[2] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, (New York: Routledge, 2005), 169.