Onearthed

A Solo Photography Exhibition by Hamid Shams, 20 February – 2 March 2015 from 4:00 to 8:00 pm

In this collection, city is regarded in light of its own immanent light-sources and through the capturing eyes of photography. City and light together would make a curious combination; on one hand, the two are hardly separable since as far as the internal formation of the city and its essential representation in the history of art is concerned, there has always been a secret codependency between the two. Yet, on the other hand, light can transform the city into something other than its commonly presumed ordinary or realistic representation. In other words, specific lights shining from peculiar angles, even though are but an immanent part of the city itself, transcend the city into something entirely different, almost unprecedented and hard to imagine. It is as if the city was flourished with crushing sense of an imminent presence, a certain deeply concealed and yet omnipresent juxtaposed feeling of shock and wait, desire and fear, hope and haplessness, loss and intensity, gathered in the same atmosphere; feelings that would only manifest themselves into a full expression if being captured by the framework of photography; a medium through which such a transient moment would last and prolong itself eternally, before the questioning eyes of any given audience from any time or place, with that certain muted yet immutable sense of a threatening violence, an escaping and yet absolute touch of sublimity, a grandeur caused by nothing other than the hollowed out space colored by dim or dense lights, as if a bitter silence doubled with a deeply manifested rage, a bundle of insurmountably irresoluble paradoxes and dilemmas paralyzing and liberating to the senses all together and at once; a sense of something on the verge of being expressed yet irrevocably lost, nor to be remembered, nor to be forgotten, commuting between an absence that gives off no return, and a presence that never lets go. This collection is, however, an endeavor to question the very notion of the space, or spatiality, so to speak. It seeks after a vision of the space in which the space becomes its own other, since it meets the time, or, as it were, the temporal element, and thus becomes something perplexed and exposed to radical otherness. Time is embodied in the light, a forward-going, ever-recurring, manifestation of the passage of time. Light, in this sense, is a symptom of transience, instability, and flux. Space, on the other hand, is of sameness and solidity, it is immune to any sense of change whatsoever, a permanent and repetitive narrative of the still-life. So, what remains the same clashes with what passes away, what sets the border of certainty collides with what goes into the heart of difference, and, finally, what resides in closeness faces what meets no end. There is a moment of risk, of fear, of violence, of sublimity, of shock, that is expressed not by lofty expressions of eloquence but by the most minimal aphorisms that any image could possibly offer. This collection is, in this regard, a questioning of the way the senses realize and perceive things; a doubtful, or rather hesitant, glance at the possibility of things, instead of the actual things themselves. Senses are left to themselves in an utmost confusion to decide over the content they are to experience; a powerful moment of two extremes rising toward one another; a rich moment in which time and space exchange properties and thus become one and the same, internally transformed, jointly portrayed, upon a vertigo of nothingness.