David & Goliath
Mitra Farahani
14 min 45 sec
Mitra Farahani’s David with the Head of Goliath n°45, embodies the atlas syndrome of confession. The multi-lingual museum guides explain Caravaggio’s painting (1607) in a variety of tonalities and storytelling, to a variety of audience and subjectivities (in Galleria Borghese, Rome). But they actually express the artwork’s own condition of “speaking object” and anatomic plan –to be dissected and analysed. In a twist of cinema vérité and collective therapy or “reading group”, Caravaggio’s painting stands for a landmark (and anachronistic image) in the definition of the modern subject – related to power relations, social redemption and self-analysis, all catalysed by the hybrid beheaded/self-portrait figure. When the artwork becomes buried under the discourses surrounding it, language itself becomes alien to it. It’s the cathartic function of the artwork to express visually the different lives, passions, fears, desires, gestures and symbols conveyed linguistically by the museum guides. Their words and self-mise en scene transport the work on the limbo of judgement and reincarnation in a way of “populating” Caravaggio’s painting through all these faces and voices. The voice of the audio-guide interferes with the ghost of the museum. Someone or something between the viewer’s confession and the artwork’s confession must survive, in seeking for the truth and at the cost of silencing (beheading) the other. Ut Pictura Poesis.
About Mitra Farahani:
Born 1975 in Iran, Mitra Farahani lives and works in Rome (Italy). After her education in painting and cinema both in Tehran and Paris (end of 1990s), she has pursued a double path of practice, between the still image and the moving image. Interested in issues of realism, martyrdom and lost or threatened artistic legacies, her documentaries (Juste une femme, 2001; Tabous. Zohre and Manouchehr, 2004; Behdjat Sadr: le temps suspendu, 2006), were highlighted and awarded in many film festivals (Berlin film festival, Paris Cinéma du Réel…), just as her critically acclaimed film on Bahman Mohassess, Fifi Howls From Happiness, 2013. The video work David with the Head of Goliath n°45 was produced for the exhibition Unedited History: Iran 1960-2014, Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris-Maxxi, Rome (2014-2015)