Saturday follows a family of five as they spend a day at the beach from the perspective of their young daughter. Director Pegah Pasalar attends to the minute, fragmentary details as an unexpected crisis unfolds to produce a poetic ambiguity.
Saturday follows a family of five as they spend a day at the beach from the perspective of their young daughter. Director Pegah Pasalar attends to the minute, fragmentary details as an unexpected crisis unfolds to produce a poetic ambiguity.
Inflatable bodies.Video Installation.2018 ongoing
Through the use of inflatable latex materials juxtaposed against the body, this series seeks its audience via a simple form: a woman encased in balloons stands helplessly as they pop. Unable to predict when any particular balloon will burst, she shivers each time, needles being thrown at her from out of frame. The fear she carries in her eyes and the small movements of her body are the product of suspenseful circumstances, the short, sharp pops taking on an almost explosion-like quality. The balloon-adorned woman stands still until every single air-filled space is popped, and she is left only in her clothes singing a childish song to comfort her.
This is a two-channel video installation, using a two-sided projection surface hung in the middle of a cubic space (or two monitors hung on two opposite sides of a wall.) Upon encountering the piece, the audience sees the close shot video of a performer’s facial expressions reacting to something unknown. As they go around, on the other side of the wall in the middle, the full shot video of the performer encased in balloons reveals itself, connecting the performer’s expressions to the actions exerted upon her body.
Air has no palpable presence, but inflatables make visible the invisible. The notion that an air-filled space can be an extension of the mind or body relates strongly to the intuitive sense that an inflatable can protect. But here, with a slight juxtaposition, it shows how it can actually be something torturous, something frightening. What is achieved is less a specific story than an atmosphere that is at once intimidating, yet also grotesque - even darkly comic. We may mask violence and domination with a veneer of respectability and culture, but to those victimized by such things, the deception is as thin as a balloon’s skin.
As an ongoing project, I have done different iterations of this video performance collaborating with women of different ethnicities, geographies with slight formal variations.
