seeing yourself / seeing others: ambiguous identification in Reza Rezaï’s sculptural photography

Photography has a problem with fixity. Too often the technology of the camera functions to sever moments into discrete objects, perpetually pinned down by the gaze of the viewer. Reza Rezaï’s 2019 interactive photographic installation “gluing a cigarette to a tomato” explores the dynamic quality of images, turning photographs into sites of movement, conflict, and encounter. The installation was comprised of three structures which stood in the middle of Platform Gallery from April 12th until May 24th, 2019. Two acrylic end tables sat on top of one another with photos on both the inside and outside of the structure. Beside it, a curved piece of acrylic snaked across the floor. A prominent photo depicts Rezaï’s younger sister Sabba in a blue sweater and backwards snapback holding her hands against each cheek, face slightly bent down. Behind it, a smaller parallel image of a person covering their face with their hands and wearing a yellow shirt and white hijab. Much larger than the others, the third structure is made of four large, mirrored cubes stacked on top of one another with many smaller photos covering parts of the mirror. The installation is in perpetual motion as you walk around it, with new images emerging and others disappearing from view. In approaching the mirror structure, the viewer becomes part of the installation itself, seeing their own image reflected behind the photographs presented. This dynamic creates an awkward, yet intimate, relationship between the viewer and the work.

The photographs feel familiar, as if they were taken from family photo albums. They are placed with the fondness of a teenager sticking photos of their best friends on a bathroom mirror. Yet, these memories do not belong to the viewer. They are moments sliced off in time from various lives pasted together like an implantation of false memories; the implications of which change based on the subjectivity of the viewer.

1. selfie culture

Upon my first visit to Rezaï’s installation, I couldn’t leave the gallery without taking a selfie in the installation’s mirror. On the bus ride home, scrolling through images on my phone, I was struck by the incongruity of the photo I had taken. Were the mirrors welcoming me into a space of identification with the artist, or was this a photographic Brechtianism forcing me to reckon with the way I construct my own image as a gallery-goer? Was I looking more at my own reflection than the art itself? This set of tensions works to trouble the ways in which memory and identification are formed through photography. These candid portraits, some of Rezaï’s own family, seemed to tell a narrative, like a slow-moving stop motion that I could not encounter without my own reflection haunting the background. How does photography act as a materialized genealogy of our memories? How do we understand our relationships to family, community, and the self through photography?

With the audience reflected in the mirrors of Rezaï’s installations, the entire gallery space becomes complicit in the work. Attention is thrown back onto the viewer who is now scrutinized. As a non-binary person who presents androgynously, my own relationship to gender and the way I appear in public spaces became enfolded into the work. Seeing my white skin in the mirror beside familial images of people of colour made me question if my viewing had taken a voyeuristic turn. Perhaps, for me, the offered intimacy of the photographs turned me into a tourist trying to step into the shoes of lived experiences I will never know. I turned from the installation and wandered around to see other works in the gallery, always looking back, catching glimpses of myself in the mirrors which were now across the room, unable to escape the painful closeness of a face staring back at me that I recognize as my own, but inhabits a world outside of mine.

ii. word & image

Instead of an artist statement, the descriptive panel presented a poem by Rezaï. The poem begins: “I was asked to talk about it / I wonder if I can put my finger on it.” Rather than a didactic aid, the poem foregrounds the difficulty of communication. The painful space between two people where the process of encoding and decoding breaks down is central to how this work explores relationships. As the poem goes on, it draws a clearer connection to the interplay between writing and photography: 

to make the abstract it into a more understandable it.  

on what makes me do the things i do. why i break the flow of time into fragments of time

and present that stillness on immovable walls and call it “art”

This reveals a metatextual element as Rezaï questions the meaning of art itself, presenting photography as a process which breaks off and fragments time. Rather than dismissing the importance of art making, however, there remains in the work an implicit importance in the act of trying to create meaning. The photographs scattered about the three structures may all be fragments, but they are not fixed. The viewer’s perspective changes depending on their position in the gallery,  continuously reconfiguring the image’s relations. The materials of the mirror deconstruct the mechanistic function of the camera itself as its internal process is made external, connecting the process of photography to the experience of viewing work in a gallery. It is as if the viewer is invited into a process of editing: asked to piece together segments of a film reel or create linearity out of scattered points on a graph. The memories represented by the photos are now disembodied, granting viewers the ability to imagine a new context and narrative. Rezaï’s piece is porous; the three sculptures, the countless angles one can encounter it from, and the poem all function as points of entry, inviting the audience into a relational process of production. 

iii. diaspora

Rezaï’s poem states that he is: “dealing with the longing of a home that i have yet to know but will never know.” The parallel feelings of familiarity and alienation from the photographs take on a specific meaning in this context. As an experience of diaspora, the mirrors show the feeling of identification with lives that are connected but come from contexts which are alien to each other. These people may be family but one divided across land, between oceans—an antinomy of intimacy and separation.  Reza RezaïRezaï’s poem states that he is: “dealing with the longing of a home that i have yet to know but will never know.” The parallel feelings of familiarity and alienation from the photographs take on a specific meaning in this context. As an experience of diaspora, the mirrors show the feeling of identification with lives that are connected but come from contexts which are alien to each other. These people may be family but one divided across land, between oceans—an antinomy of intimacy and separation.  

Rezaï’s poem states: “I am trying to find solace within a divided diaspora that can’t seem to get it right.” Qualifying “diaspora” with “divided” might seem tautological, yet I think this word speaks to the problem of an assumed oneness that holds identity groups together across different lands. Yet, the physical separation also extends to an emotional separation. Diaspora is assumed to share commonality, yet as individual communities grow apart, they are faced with the potential of seeing others in the diaspora—those meant to be their intimate relations—as strangers. The title of the work “gluing a cigarette to a tomato” perhaps speaks to this: a conjoining of disparate objects, a coming together which produces a somewhat grotesque scene. Viewing oneself in the mirror beside the photographs thus becomes an attempt to articulate that experience of diaspora: of seeing yourself reflected in strangers. There still exists difficulty, however—“can’t seem to get it right”—the failings of communities to be with one another even when they are supposedly tied by shared culture, history, or beliefs. Though we are not given a window into the specific conflicts of this diaspora, the tension of relating to others who are both your extended family and strangers is palpable throughout Rezaï’s work.

What drew me to return to this installation was the way in which it engaged in dialogue between the viewer and the rest of the work in the gallery. The mirrors both reflect the self and insert the viewer into the patchwork of narratives that wind together, the unknown becoming familiar only to recede into strangeness when viewed from a new angle. There is an ethic being articulated by this work; an interrogation of the demand marginalized communities are often faced with, of giving a unified account of their stories, their truth. This work foregrounds the impossibility of ever fully knowing another, setting up a relationship with the viewer which invites both intimacy and distance. Rezaï’s work offers a reminder of the problems with identification; what it means to insert yourself into someone else’s narrative, to be invited into a community, or to remain outside. If this work is exploring the self-other dichotomy, it does so by emphasizing the distance between the two, and asking us not to be afraid. 

Jase Falk is a non-binary writer based in Winnipeg who currently is interested in the relationship between words and images.

This article is published in issue 36.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue