Mitra Tabrizian IRAN/UK
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Mitra Tabrizian was born in Iran, but has been residing in London for some time now. During the 1980s, she situated her art practice with reference to a number of exciting and innovative theoretical developments. These included poststructuralist philosophies, psychoanalytic and feminist insights into visual culture, cultural studies approaches to racial and social difference, and an incisive awareness of the complex effects of migration and exile on representation. Conceptual artists and photographers also began to offer critiques of the culture of advertising and commodity by seizing some of its codes and rendering them distanced, thus making the viewer aware that such representations are conventions inflected by power dynamics. Tabrizian brought these
insights to bear on recent political imagery. By seizing its theatrical codes and turning them to show their constructed character, Tabrizian offered a subtle and compelling critique of the violence that propaganda imagery sublimates to its own ends. What is so powerful about Tabrizian’s work is that she accomplishes this subtle distancing by a mastery of the slickness and precision of corporate imagery and advertising practices itself, rather than taking the easy way out by relying on lo-tech or kitsch imagery. Her dazzling translation of “capitalist realism” and of revolutionary imagery at a very high technical level renders her work uncanny and disturbing of conventional worldviews. Tabrizian’s artistic concerns are evident in Predator (2004), a short film about a
