PHENOMENOLOGY

VIDEO

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A young woman’s undressing plays in reverse, yet the clothing she “puts on” is not only hers.​

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Made in Iran, Phenomenology is a video featuring me taking off 200 articles of clothing, played in reverse. Influenced by early slapstick cinema and shown on an indefinite loop, the reversed motion contextualizes the covering of the female body in a patriarchal society as a cyclical historical phenomenon. The act of covering becomes humorous and breaks the expectation of linear time, an absurd gesture of bodily concealment. The seemingly endless repetition poses the question of whose body needs to be covered and how this process is facilitated.

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Filmmakers have applied reverse motion toward a willful destructive misrecognition of time, using it to imagine rewinding unpleasant history away. ​Reverse motion can deform the actions of normal individuals into foolish and laughable trajectories. In 1896, early cinema technology made it possible for the first time to view a simulation of entropy’s reversal – that is, to watch time run backwards. 

The reverse motion has the capacity to deepen our understanding of history by laying bare the forces of its production and uncovering absences produced by forwarding time.

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