An exhibition supported by Ruinart
B21 gallery presents an all-video exhibition of work by one of the most exciting Iranian video artist of her generation, from October 27 to November 12, 2009.

A woman stands on a verdant clifftop near Cancun in Mexico. The wind has blown her summer dress tight to her, the pale sea is whitened with surf. She’s in silence. This could almost be a perfect photograph. But it isn’t. We see the fronds of the palm trees around her rattling in the wind, we see a boat, just in the distance, bobbing lazily. And her face, trying to maintain a sincere smile, twitches in the rising and falling waves of her self-consciousness.

This is Iranian artist Leila Pazooki’s Two Minute Photo; an ironic yet sympathetic reflection on the frailties of our picture-perfect moments. Taking her video camera to Mexico, southern Spain, Germany and parts of Iran, Pazooki found complete strangers  and asked if she could film them, posing in the style of a holiday snap, for two long minutes.

Pazooki questions the very nature of our pursuit of ‘paradise’, and the idea that we can capture and affirm this with our cameras. The photograph has become ubiquitous. We fill our lives with these monuments to our ‘good times’, a reflection of what the artist identifies as our constant search to fix the perfect moment. In the flash of a camera, that perfection appears to be assured. But by freezing these moments, and letting life continue around them, Pazooki shows us life’s inescapable imperfection. She shows us the flimsiness of the idea that we can capture or fix life in the shape of perfection, as the tide washes in around our feet.
Of course, it’s not all quite so tragic. There’s an unavoidable streak of irony that runs through what Pazooki is doing. It’s in the haughty, poseur attitude of two Iranian women, sitting in a café with their cocked eyebrows hidden only by huge, designer sunglasses. It’s in the coquettish pose of two girls in front of the sea in Andalucia, how their legs shudder under the unnatural pose they offer to the camera. We see these people, these characters that Pazooki has discovered, laying their self-image bare to crumble as the camera rolls on.

But why is there some sadness about all of the images in this show? Is it stillness that provokes this feeling? Perhaps it’s that we can empathise with these posing people. We have all grinned in group shots, pulled unnatural faces, given something of ourselves to a snapshot. So when we see these moments, stretched to the horizon, we also see the inevitable decay about them. We are witness to the tragic mirror that these settings, carefully picked to reflect the greatest sense of time passing (a shoreline, a windswept clifftop, a busy café), hold up to the notion that we can hold onto perfection in its transience.

Perhaps it’s the rawness in what we’re seeing. Time strips us down, Pazooki seems to say. By putting a prolonged tension on our perfected pose, we see it buckle under the strain. We can understand the flashes of self-consciousness in the eyes of her subjects. We can imagine the black lens staring at them, scrutinising them. We even understand, and perhaps smile along, when these people let an unstoppable smirk overcome their faces.

We are acutely aware of Pazooki herself in these videos. The artist refers to all of these works as a ‘documentation of a performance’: the act of her approaching complete strangers with the intention to stare into their eyes for two minutes, and for them to stare back. Pazooki hints at it as a confrontation, she calls their poses ‘provocative’ – yet not in a seductive sense. Is there some kind of standoff here that Pazooki’s films are documenting, and is this why we see a shaky camera – why she refused a tripod?

Either way, stare at these Two Minute Photos long enough and the characters recede. The static figures in the forefront fade away and we’re left with a living scene. The ebbing tide, the violence of the wind; there’s a haunting majesty about a world that is never in stasis. As the German filmmaker Werner Herzog remarks in one of his documentaries, ‘Seemingly empty moments [of film have] a strange, secret beauty. Sometimes images themselves develop their own life, their own mysterious stardom.’ It’s as if Pazooki is giving a nod to that mystery. In doing so, she urges us towards the unfathomable nature of our own memories. Our truly perfect moments are entirely unknowable, entirely inexplicable. They are not moments at all, but fragments of moments –the glint of the sun from a scene of our childhood, the sharp wind on a clifftop in Cancun. They are images, but not in a visual sense. Pazooki talks of one of her earliest memories, and can vividly recall only the heat on her back as she played in the grass. They remain, like the woman in a full chador staring out to the ocean, entirely unknowable – just out of reach.

Ironic yet sensitive, her work contributes to the battle against dogmas and “borders” which have been shaping the world through ideological and political prejudices by exploring themes of youth and identity and their inherent paradoxes. She has recently participates in the touring exhibition ‘Iran Inside Out’ which kicked off at the Chelsea Museum in NYC. She currently takes part of the show 'The Promise of Loss’ at the gallery Ernst Hilger in Vienna.