Ali Navid
Exhibition of studio work at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau, QC. The installations were part of a term-long teamwork exploration of architecture as critique based on the concept of the carnivalesque. Selected NAC Posters, Photographed and enlarged for reproduction. The installation entices the viewer experience every position of the site at once, the viewer is a performer. The layering of different stages of events and architecture helps to break down the setting and limit the viewer only by time not space. a non transitional event.
Brutalist architecture
You walk from Queen or Elgin,
#HashtagPossibilitiesareendless.
“rarely does the eye light on a thing”
“the eye does not see things but the images of things that mean other things”
“when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing:”
“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy”
“he lives, continually subject to an envy”
the print on the wall marks the passage of Kim’s Convenience
“I wonder what an artist is?”
“ the man who makes a journey”
does not yet know the place
“Wonder what the place will be like”
#HashtagPossibilitiesareendless.
once he takes the leap of faith inside
“If a building has no signboard or figure, its very form and position... indicate its function:”
That place, bunker, cinema, theater, army base.
all the rest are concert panels and brutal textures
Cathedrals were built of marble,
“but you can’t see the walls anymore”
“they’re covered with all kinds of things,”
“This is human crap, and it’s fine.”
finally the journey leads to the underground red carpet
portraits indicates the VIP passage
“a sign! That something who knows what? “
“other signs of what is forbidden”
who would ever
journey leads to the dark
behind the kiosk, maybe it’s close maybe not
your gaze scans the place
“We’ll be able to surround people with sound, light and action”
journey to theatre
ceiling and walls says everything you must think
while you think you are observing
“you are only recording”
memories, images. merely spectacle
“We can move up, down, horizontally, diagonally.”
emotional journey of performance begins
“the ability to integrate them into the very life blood of the community’s activity”
journey through opera
this is different he said
“My wife and I walked out of the opera house at Lincoln Center”
an operatic journey of the city
“what line separates the inside from outside”
“I realized I had to free myself from the images”
Only then I can see what he wished I would see
“The National Arts Centre is a centre for the performing arts”
“The same modernization that removed time from the voyage
also removed from it the reality of space.”
“This is a return to the street theatre of the middle ages.”
I know I must not go down but I did
I saw the labyrinth, more portraits of VIPs
#HashtagPossibilitiesareendless.
“seeing comes before words.”
I know before I can speak
His eyes establish ‘me’ in his surrounding space
“The natural basis of time, the concrete experience of its passage, becomes human and
social...”
He can never settle the relationship between what he sees and what he knows
“We have nothing of our own except time, which even the homeless can experience”
As time goes, He moved along the red walls
When he least expect it he saw the back of his world
He saw the shadow of the shadows
“Could you build projection bays .... under the floor?”
possible
“I can’t find a director who would be interested”
“Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space”
“Perhaps the stage exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids”
#HashtagPossibilitiesareendless.
“I would like to be able to open great spaces under people,
have them sit on air, have space fall all around them, or close in on them.”
To open, eyes
To, open eyes
#HashtagPossibilitiesareendless.
Society of the spectacle
Ways of Seeing
The Urgency of Change
Invisible Cities
An Interview with Fred Lebensold
by Richard Schechner