REZA AFISINA

Employing video, perfomance, and installation, and often using his own body in his work, Afisina explores the manifestations and meanings of physical and emotional pain. In his performance and video An Easy Time With Parenthood (2008), a text from Julio Cortazar’s short story Las babas del diablo is tattooed on the artist’s arm alongside a biblical text in Latin. Experimenting with word as image, Afisina theorizes that pain is not only indicative of violence, but can also function as a reflection of honesty, freedom, and even happiness. His earlier video My Chemical Sisters (2004), which depicts cosmetics ingredients against images of advertising models, explores pain in a different way. Made mostly from chemicals, the cosmetics here embody a disjunction between our desire for physical perfection and the toxins we employ in the hope of achieving it. Afisina’s later installation, Letters to International Curators (2008), departs from his established thematic to focus instead on the concept of written and personal interaction and the communicative limits of language. The exhibited work consists of documentation of a series of exhibition proposals by the artist that was sent to curators of his acquaintance worldwide.