Adam Cohen presents Saam Farahmand's first US solo exhibition. GOD PARTY. The exhibition will be on view at A Hug From The Art World (515 West 19th Street, New York, NY, 10011) from March 10th through April 2nd, 2022.
God Party is a series of looped films merging into a 'mega-loop,' each new segment seamlessly joining with the last, almost echoing the unbroken structure of the blockchain. The films were all shot in the Warner Brothers Studio Backlot in 2018, with a giant, ambitiously designed robotic rig (the 'Titan-X', built for the making of this piece before being retired for its complexity). After two years in postproduction, God Party is now presented as a high resolution LED wall installation.
Having waited over a decade for technology to catch up to the scale of his ambition, Farahmand was able to move the camera through the environment with uncompromising control and precise repetition.
The film's laws were calibrated to those of contemporary advertising, in that poetry, symbolism and allegory co-exist with spectacle and pageantry. Characters act out fragmented vignettes of stylized atrocity, like merged algorithms of social media, banner ads, news, and pop-culture fever dreams.
When all primary human experience, and raw human nuance has been appropriated and given audio visual form, where then do we find the raw, or the primary?
As French Author Georges Duhamel says: "I can no longer think what I want to think, my thoughts have been replaced by moving images."
Farahmand assimilates and interrogates the cues and codes of commercially motivated audio visual languages. In particular, the use of affirmation psychology to target free-thinkers and advanced contemporary mutations of marketing languages, that seek to co-opt social politics, identity politics, and activism as part of their messaging and mission.
The incongruity of a 2022 wartime feed is where Farahmand's work lives. It's not about punching up or down, and it's not about judgement, but it's an interrogation of an impending, inevitable reality. If you look at what sits side by side in your feed, today, this is the rapidly dissolving line between atrocity and pop culture/consumerism.
Saam Farahmand, Iranian-British video artist and film maker, was born in 1979, the year of the Iranian revolution. His aunt was imprisoned for removing her headscarf in public and his grandfather, a public figure, was executed by soldiers of the new regime. His parents had him birthed in London. His earliest memories of film were home-made edits of movies on TV that his father made for him on VHS, not telling him he had cut out all scenes of profanity, sex or violence. For many years, he believed Rambo was a 22 minute existential silent story of a man wandering through the forest.
Farahmand took the same Goldsmiths Fine Art course as several Turner Prize winners including
Steve McQueen. He worked predominantly as a video artist and was selected by Bloomberg's New Contemporaries, before transitioning fully into pop culture and becoming the first director of color to win 'Best Director' at the MVA's in the UK and being named 'one of the most influential music video directors of his generation' by The Guardian and Times magazine.
He has worked with artists such as
Mick Jagger,
Janet Jackson, Rihanna, M.I.A.,
Mark Ronson, late rapper Juice Wrld, and the late designer Lee (Alexander) McQueen who he encouraged to make his first narrative film before he passed.
Farahmand has created campaigns for global brands including Apple, Comcast, Absolute Vodka, Coca Cola, NBC, Ford, Lincoln, McDonalds, Pirelli, Levis, The Grammys, and Nike. His work has appeared in exhibitions and festivals around the world and in many publications including
President Barack Obama's guest curated edition of Wired magazine.
Selected Exhibition History: Drama, Asia House, London (2018). VideoPortraits, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2009). Ghost, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (2009). Part of the Weekend Never Dies, Royal Festival Hall, London (2008). The Paradiso Effect, Hayward Gallery, London (2008). The Paradiso Effect, ICA London (2005).
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