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titleRoom No: The Unconscious 

installation

date. 2014

location. Academy Of Fine Arts Vienna

While I was engaged with farshido's works,especially the doll collages,I could finally convince myself that either there is no conceptual art or all art is conceptual.Art must be conceptual and perceptual if it is to generate artistic discussion per se.Naming him a conceptual artist is the outcome of a reductive approach for which I am not.there is a huge difference between these sorts of collages(such as Farshido's) and the others.what makes his art especial is the fact that the conception is directly tied to or dependent on perception in them.the experience we confront with in many works today is aesthetic;but not artistic.the class of the artistic is a subclass of the aesthetic.What I'm trying to say is that farshido's experience is not reduced to the aesthetic level.It goes beyond and leads in the artistic experience.A necessary element of his sort of experience is that attention is paid to intrinsic properties of objects and events.I insist that these works are artworks and those individuals who believe not should reconsider their claim.Not only are they artistic but also progressive.there is a Carollian formula for defining a work of art:

X is a work of art if and only if x is an artefact and x is treated in such a way that someone who is fluent in a culture is led to direct attention (perception and/or reflection) to aesthetic properties of x.

 

But what is the significance of Farshido's artistic experience in?what makes it different and remarkable?

One of Farshido's criteria to choose his material and to examine their accordance and effectiveness to objectify his manifesto is his classificatory approach to the aesthetic properties of the objects:

1. Pure value properties: being beautiful,sublime,ugly;

2. Formal qualities: being balanced,tightly knit,graceful;

3. Emotion properties: being sad, joyful, angry;

4. Behavioural properties: being bouncy, daring,sluggish;

5. Evocative qualities: being powerful, boring,amusing;

6. Representational qualities: being true-to life,distorted, realistic;

7. Second-order perceptual properties: being-vivid or pure (said of colors or tones);

8. Eistorically related properties: being original,bold, derivative.

 

He discovers these qualities and properties in objects,follows their history and traces and applies them to express the invisible.If you ask him to stay in a room with a few people and observe them and then creates a remake of what he perceived, by collage or painting,you may observe the hidden or repressed desires of those individuals.you may see the behaviour that object can have,even their personage,history and all forms of invisible forces and drives.Also in this installation we can see objects gaining humane characteristics and individuals loosing them.the dominance belongs to the objects,machines,and systems.sometimes it is even difficult to put distinction between the lively and the soulless,between the forgery and reality.He hides the expressiveness in expressionlessness.everything hides itself behind its shadows.emotions are independent and need no one to express them.monstrosity doesn't belong to the unknown.you are introduced to your forgotten rusted self.the repressed has returned.It is like a dream or nightmare,but the remote control is in your hand and you choose what to be afraid of or what to be shocked for.

To cut it short what I see in this installation is the artistic representation of the unconscious mind of the modern days.  

 

 ✒︎ Adel Hashemi

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