In his second solo show at Elisabeth Kaufmann, which includes five videos and a sound installation, Shahryar Nashat has sealed the window with sheets of red plastic, so that the entire gallery is bathed in an eerie reddish light. The young Swiss artist, who is of Iranian descent, found the raw material for this body of work in the Rome archive of the Italian Workers’ Movement. Using authentic written and cinematic documentation of the activities of the Italian police (some dating back fifty years), he has assembled a parable on the use of force and its consequences. Letters from partisans condemned to death by the Fascists are stenciled onto the walls in red paint, and the five LCD screens are set into red wooden panels. In one of the videos, policemen practice their boxing skills, their blood reiterating the installation’s chromatic motif. Red is the color of violence—but it’s also the color of the bouquet of roses that a demonstrator places at the feet of a “peace officer” in Nashat’s video of the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa. Thus depictions of terror and repression are undercut by images of resistance and courage. The concept that the international press has been unwittingly driving home for weeks—that oppression is timeless and looks the same everywhere—is asserted just as bluntly, but with more critical subtlety, in Nashat’s strongest show to date.
Translated from German by Emily Speers Mears.
