_Entropic Fields of Displacement

“And so she goes looking, searching without asking, sifting through whatever the city and its bodies reveal, not wanting to excavate or exhume, not wanting to make a noise or draw attention to herself.” trans(re)lating house one – Poupeh Missaghi.

Continuing in her recurrent exploration of the political and social implications of the aesthetics of lens-based surveillance performances and digital culture, Pegah Tabassinejad’s new body of work, Entropic Fields of Displacement, attends to questions of transnational feminist subjectivity amongst West Asian women and the geographic confines by which these women move and are perceived through space and time.

Entropic Fields Of Displacement features an amalgamation of sound and images that act as an ecosystem for an eight-channel video installation assembled by Tabassinejad. These works establish themselves as windows or, perhaps, portals that trace the movement of eight West Asian women as they are guided by the artist and serendipity in an exploration of the cityscapes of Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Lebanon, Germany and Canada.

In the course of their exploration, the women participate in a collective experience of unravelling the power that curtails their movements in the locations they find themselves situated within, chance encounters with other bodies and structures that unearth the limits imposed on their bodies and the potential pleasure and agency that comes from being both the subject of a surveilling gaze as well as holding another sort of surveilling gaze.

Tabassinejad’s work situates itself within an ongoing canon of feminist cultural production that deduces the potential of liberatory acts of resistance that shroud themselves within minor and ordinary gestures such as wandering, running, listening, and looking.

The images within the frame of Tabassinejad’s works act as beacons, invitations and confrontations to their viewers and propose a praxis of emancipated spectatorship that subverts the preconceived notions and social powers that dictate how the bodies and likeness of the marginalized are discerned and surveilled.

Olumoroti Soji-George