Imaginary Dividing Lines

Currently on view at the Big Orbit Gallery are three conceptual works by Foad Mozaffari, who came to the visual arts by a circuitous path. He studied engineering in Iran, but decided to switch fields when he immigrated to America with his family in 2001. Initially, he experimented in traditional art forms such as painting and printmaking. Then he decided to study the electronic arts.

Mozaffari’s Identification is informed by Iran’s current political situation. It is a video game comprising three toy machine guns aimed at a projection screen and works like the carnival duck shooting game. You take aim at the screen and fire away. Each separate gun fires bits of pixilated images containing different influences that have been vying for control of Iran: Islamic, Marxist, or capitalist. When all three are simultaneously fired, chaos ensues. No one gun or sphere of influence can ever fully gain control in this uneasy coexistence.

Mozaffari attempts to convey to his audience that Iran is not a country populated solely by radicals who hate the West. There are factions who have been struggling to open the country to freer political thought. For a brief period of a half dozen years in the 1990s, a more democratic body took power in Iran and things began to flower. However, the current ruling government is a repressive Islamic regime that has drowned out the voices of moderate reformers. Mozaffari believes this is a worldwide phenomenon, governments held hostage by the few with extremist leftist or rightist ideologies silencing those with more moderate views.

Given the current tumult with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it is easy to demonize entire populations. In Power, Politics and Culture, literary theorist Edward Said stated, “Nothing is easier for people to deal with something that is different than to portray it as dangerous and threatening and to reduce it ultimately to a few cliches.”

Mozaffari’s untitled installation contains banners of varying colors associated with the Middle East: black, red, white, and green. These are hung vertically, and one can walk through the installation. Attached to the banners are sensors that, when tripped, activate a voice recording of a famous speech delivered by Parliamentarian Arthur Balfour in 1918. It is a justification of Britain’s colonial expansion into Egypt. When all the sensors go off, the audio blends into a nonsense of white noise.

In Balfour’s speech one hears the beginnings of how the US eventually would view and frame conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq. The speech promotes expansionist policy under the guise of doing good for the people of suppressed countries.

Local Anesthetic is a locally inspired piece. When Mozaffari moved to Buffalo to study, he was struck the economic division and income inequality prevalent in the region, geographically creating a sharp delineation along Main Street, which segregates the city along predominately black and white lines. Lastly, he was struck by the boundaries between the city and its outlying suburbs, particularly between UB South and North Campuses.

In Local Anesthetic, projected images of silhouettes mingle with one another. Composite recordings of sound and video images were taken from the Broadway Market on the East Side and the Big Orbit Gallery in the Elmwood Village, an area recently voted one of the top 10 neighborhoods in the country. Mozaffari had people interact with each other in real time, communicating through microphones hooked up at both locations. Viewers were unable to see one another clearly; what they saw instead were blurry images of the person they were talking to. Mozaffari wanted to see how participants would react to each other when racial and economic identities were unknown factors. The piece is reminiscent of Plato’s cave, wherein prisoners see and speculate on shadowy figments of the real world.

About how the media portrays the ongoing conflicts between the West and the Middle East, Said once wrote, “It’s as if they’ve always been standing on opposite sides of some immense ditch and all they do is throw rotten food at each other.” Mozaffari points out the same can perhaps be said of different groups in Western New York.

Local Anesthetic is on view until Saturday April 19 @ Big Orbit Gallery, 30d Essex Street (560-1968 / bigorbitgallery.org).