HOW DO YOU SPELL TINDER IN PERSIAN



4-channel video installation, 2017
video: 05:40 min, 898 x 2304 px



The formal composition of the video collage is based on the late medieval Persian painting „The Seduction of Yusuf“ by Behzād. I digitally recreated the shape of the painted house and filled it with my own videos and animated images portraying me enacting several characters. As a starting point for video and photo productions I used elements from social media and dating apps which I combined with motifs of fairy tales. The video was shown on four screens.



installation view
Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Basel, CH





In the tent located in the middle part of the house I play with myself a self-invented card game. I used screenshots of my real male Tinder matches as the template for the cards. Next, I printed the screenshots, edited and marked each one of them with numbers representing the attack and defense points. Every card has a male name and an age as well. In the video, I play them off against each other.





HDYSTIP is a meditation on love and the role of self-staging in the time of dating and social apps. The work deals with romantic cliches and existential need for love in today's consumer society. I use the fairytale character 'Rapunzel' which appears in the lower part of the house on the two iPhones as an allegory for solitude and narcissism. By this means I thematize the inability of the modern subject to get free from its self-imposed ideology.