Figures on the Edge.
This multicomponent output comprises: Tabrizian’s feature film Gholam (2017); Film Stills (2018-19), her photographic works inspired by Gholam; You Don’t Know What Nights Are Like? (2017–18), two 10-metre billboards displayed outside Southwark Underground Station; The Insider (2018), an experimental video made with author Ben Okri reworking Albert Camus’s The Outsider. These interconnected projects are Tabrizian’s search for complex visual forms with which to represent figures at the margins of contemporary society. See Portfolio Booklet for documentation of research dimensions.
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- qqv24
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- Figures on the Edge was first screened at WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival, Houston, US, April 21–30, 2017. Further details in portfolio.
- Brief description of type
- Other: Multicomponent
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- April
- Year
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Tabrizian’s multi-layered output comprises a series of complex, interrelating filmic and photographic works, including a feature-length film as the lead component. Cohering around the theme of existentialist portrayals of marginalised figures in contemporary society, the output is based on Tabrizian’s long-term research extending possibilities of documentary and storytelling forms, especially concerning representation of diasporic lives and migrant spaces. The output components grew out of her photographic works whose research stretches back two decades. The study of exiled Iranians, Border (2005-06), links into the feature-length film in that one of the subjects in the series became the inspiration for Gholam’s protagonist.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- In four film and photographic projects, Tabrizian presents a series of existentialist figures: the migrant, the precarious, the other. Her aesthetic mode emphasises enigma and unknowability, complicating the association between visibility and knowing, and in this way departs from the representational convention of restoring visibility to people at the margins in terms of a call for recognition. Gholam, initially inspired by an Iranian exile in London Tabrizian had photographed, proposes a filmic mode that relies upon intimation, qualities necessary to function within the restrictions of Iranian political culture. In a non-Iranian context, Tabrizian’s storytelling intimates or implies but never specifies. This becomes a way to develop viewers’ identification with and sympathy for a migrant character while maintaining his mystery. In Film Stills, Tabrizian subverts this photographic format to visualise extras and scenes without people. Similarly, Tabrizian uses visual understatement to conjure the emotional reality of workers on night shifts in her billboard works. Tabrizian shoots The Insider from the perspective of the figure killed by the protagonist of Camus’s novel, only referred to in the book as “the Arab”.
Through intimate and insightful analysis of her subject and the documentary form, Tabrizian’s research reworks the complex relationship between what’s within and beyond the frame to create an existentialist form for our time.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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