ART CITIES:Madrid-Farideh Lashai
Since her childhood Farideh Lashai worked in painting, glass carving and calligraphy and in the last years of her life created video installations that offer a natural fusion of painting, poetry, theatre, film, animation and sound. In Lashai’s complex and delicate work the poetic subtlety of the Persian tradition establishes a dialogue with accounts of the past, an acute sensitivity towards natural phenomena and a focus on the social and political conditions of her day.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado Archive
The last work by Farideh Lashai “When I count, there are only you…but when I look, there is only a shadow“ (2012-13), a video installation is on presentation at Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid . Each individual print in the work relates to one of Francisco de Goya’s prints from the “Disasters of War” series (1810-20) with the figures removed. The finished composition follows Goya’s sequence of prints from left to right and top to bottom, excluding the last three prints that are in the Goya original. A video element accompanies the composition in which the figures removed from the prints re-appear in a projection. To create the work, Goya’s original series, “he Disasters of War”, was scanned from a collection in Boston in 2010. The scanned images were digitally manipulated to take all the human and animal figures out. The digital files were printed on transparent films, in this case on Kodak transparency film to then produce a very fine digital print which included all the details and grey tones. The video work was done by Kambiz Safari in Iran. All the figures in Goya’s prints were animated and placed within three layers of video superimposed on each other. In the finished result, as the spotlight bounces from one print to another various parts of the animation briefly appear and disappear. This presentation offers a unique occasion to see Lashai’s work located alongside the prints by Goya that inspired them and between his “Black Paintings” and “The 3rd of May”. The result is a dialogue that reveals the ongoing relevance of Goya’s message two centuries later.
Info: The Museo del Prado, Paseo del Prado, Madrid, Duration: 30/5-10/9/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-20:00, Sun 10:00-19:00, www.museodelprado.es
