Bita Razavi: The Dog Days Will be Over Soon

9.8 – 1.9.2019

Wed – Sun 12 – 17

The Dog Days Will be Over Soon comprises new works that I made while spending time in the environment of video games. A series of photographs in gilded frames that allude to classical landscape paintings. They are, however, screenshots from video games – beautiful computer-generated scenery. A video work explores the same imagery, taking on an impressionist approach towards the ephemeral nature of light and its effect on colors. For that I recorded the footage over and over again under different light and weather conditions. In a series of sculptures with discarded game electronics and plants, on the other hand, I suggest another relationship between organic and digital. Dysfunctional electronics resting in nature; the site I see often when I walk in the forest. This time in a real forest and not in a video game.

I’ve became allergic to the trend of physical/digital, algorithmic future and AI related exhibitions. Allergy is a bodily response to something, a response that can lead to dysfunction and withdrawal. Also, it is resistance. To instructions we have to follow and games we have to play. I’ve had only 10 days of rest this year. I spent one evening of it with a friend in Tartu, talking about this and that. He told me why he never submitted his PhD thesis. I told him why I think this exhibition and its text don’t make sense anymore. I told him about my allergy.

Then I explained how I enjoyed spending hours in different computer games wandering through the forest, along the riverbank, staring at the landscape, trying to choose the perfect image. The only thing I didn’t do was actually play the game and complete a mission. I showed him my footage of a bear attacking a deer and footage of the sunrise and sunset I recorded by the same lake. He told me this is disobedience, not fulfilling the tasks that are expected of you, not being productive and functional. We talked about The Praise of Laziness and how the advanced capitalist model considers rest and its unproductiveness a threat to its core; the leverage of guilt that most of the global population begin to feel when being unproductive. We talked about non-activity, just wandering around, staring and gazing. Resting!