Kamrooz Aram/Takahiko IImura

6 November–24 November 2007

Artist Talk by Kamrooz Aram Sunday 4 November 3pm

Transmission gallery present the work of two artists whose practices invite scrutiny of the manner in which aesthetic value is contingent upon cultural perspectives. Having both lived between the United States and Iran and Japan respectively the work of Kamrooz Aram and Takahiko Iimura questions the privileged view of culture as it is taken in by the Western gaze armed with an self-awareness of the problems inherent in issues of identity politics.

Kamrooz Aram’s paintings often speak with the simultaneous vocabularies of the emanating angels of the Christian renaissance, Iranian political poster art, Islamic tessellation and 8-bit computer game graphics. That the Nintendo Entertainment System should infuse a practice concerned with how image and icon are assembled in the art of the West and Islamic Middle East is fully in keeping with Aram’s examination of how the contemporary artist makes sense of ‘the Other’. His paintings are incisive studies of the complexity inherent in viewing the East from the West and vice versa, with any suggestion of didactic polarisation disrupted by the permeation of one geographic eye line into the other and high culture into low. Experiments in composition, saturated palate and use of iconography accentuate the instability and potential rawness of cultural borrowings and jarring comparisons. There is invitation to trace codes and patterns but with attempts at decryption met with a deeper enmeshing in cultural signifiers and confrontation with the unforgiving nature of reinforced stereotypes.

In contrast Takahiko Iimura’s film MA (intervals) is a very direct attempt to examine an aesthetic notion rooted in a particular culture. Existing between the worlds of the New York avant-garde and the experimental art underground of his native Tokyo Iimura experienced a detachment from his cultural roots. This division provoked his investigation of the Japanese concept of ma, a notion which conflates spacial arrangement and time to focus of intervals and negative space between objects rather than viewing them in isolation. Confessing that he found the idea difficult to grasp, in his endeavours to understand it he began to find parallels in Henri Bergson’s discussion of duration as a fundamental tool in experiencing the world and imagined its application to filmmaking. The pithy minimalism of MA (intervals) exists between complete abstract film and experimental movie using only black film, which blocks light, and transparent film as its basic materials.

Transmission would like to thank Wilkinson Gallery, Keir McGuiness, Michael King and Fiona King.