Nazafarin Lotfi

“Ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer contained or repressed or blocked from view. In other words, haunting is a way we’re notified that what’s been suppressed or concealed is very much alive and present, interfering with us and with the systems of repression that produce concealment and blockage.”

—Avery Gordon, Haunting and Thinking from the Utopian Margins: Conversation with Avery Gordon

Vanishing Point explores encountering absent subjects and interacting with the exteriority of what is established as the other. Giving up verticality, the sculptures on the floor throughout the exhibition evoke bodies (human and non-human), addressing the politics of horizontality (ground) in relation to dehumanization, invisibility, and incompleteness. They are places of bodies departed, containers empty of content, that privilege the ground honoring those denied of it. The lying figures invite the viewing bodies to extend beyond their boundaries and project themselves out onto them in an act of making, as if in a counter-world.

The textured surfaces of the sculptures expand throughout space within the wall pieces, offering scopic views of areas zoomed in or zoomed out. Folded and draped over the wood panels, the surfaces materialize a multi-dimensional relationship between the image and the support, rejecting the figure ground division.

The works are not merely concerned with what appears and how it appears from the horizon line; what is present (materialized) is as much active as what is absent (immaterial), both equally participating in the making. The dynamic interaction between what is there and what is not emphasizes absence and emptiness as generative spaces. Vanishing point is about existence and non-existence, the irony of negating life at the very point that actualizes the possibility of bringing new worlds to life.

– text by Nazafarin Lotfi

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