Corner of my room
• Site-specific installation, 2018
• Reflective film, see-through mirrors, light, audio track
• Size: 2 x 2 x 3 Ft
• Corner of my room is a site-specific public installation located in the corner of a building in West Village NY. This work has a sister installation, called and the alleyway to the prison’s garden exhibited in Brooklyn. The two titles come together as an allegory of family interrelationships in exile and diaspora, questioning the way physical distance impacts the fundamental structures of communication and connection between displaced parents and children.
In the process of making this work the artist examines new means of deeper connection with their own family by conducting interviews with each of their parents. During the dialogue, they showed a series of videos depicting abstract interplays of light and shadows to each of their mother and father, asking two open-ended questions of “what do you see?” and “why do you say that?”. These short snippets were originally shot from metal and reflective sculptures reacting to light throughout time in the corner of the artist’s studio. However, the abstract nature of the videos depicted architectural or natural landscapes instigating a state of losing one’s sense of space.
Their mother’s responses to the videos were mostly formal descriptions of the light and shadows, along with specific memories and emotional stories tied to fear, sadness or nostalgia. At times she anticipated an imagined time to come. “It's a frame to the future / makes one feel that the future is obscure / no one knows what will happen, but it’s bright,” she responded.
In “Corner of my room”, Rostami built an infinite cube by employing mirror-like surfaces, light, and shadows based on their mother's perception of spaces and recollections of memories. An audio component plays fragments from the interview on the sidewalk as pedestrians pass by.
The installation is activated by both sunlight and two LEDs. As the source of light moves, the reflections create light-drawings of fluid forms emulating waves of an ocean in the interior wall of the cube.
Participatory Performance:
During a participatory performance, a limited number of people were invited to visit the corner for a personal viewing. The static light of the installation was switched off and the participants were asked to bring their own sources of light. After finding the corner, each person activated the room and interacted with the space individually, while listening to the audio track.
The corner installation activated by static LED light:
In summer 2018, Rostami conducted interviews with both their parents by asking them open-ended questions of what they see as they watched a video piece depicting spaces made of reflective materials, light and shadow. The audio at “ Corner of my room” is fragments of their mother’s responses to this videos.
Audio transcription:
I only like the light in it, I don’t like the rest of it
It’s showing the shadows
it wants to make something visible, but if it talks to me with darkness, I have no business with it.
I only will see the light in it
I am inside of an airplane, I look down and I see the clouds
It's a frame to the future
makes one feel that the future is obscure
no one know what will happen, but it’s bright.
It’s a triangle
it’s white and it has a curl,
this other triangle on the other side could be the past.
it could be corner of a room
It is night,
there’s a bed,
and there’s a woman rolling in bed.
Or perhaps it is the sea. But even if it’s the sea, still there’s a person rolling in it.
That time when I boarded on a ship that wasn’t yet traveling. The captan let us in to see inside of the ship. I was looking at the sea behind the window inside the ship.
It is this light that wants to draw the sea from afar,
but it just all might be inside of a room.
That time we were walking in the sea, and we weren’t swimming. All of a sudden, we felt that there’s nothing under our feet.
I wasn’t scared in the beginning and thought I can swim to pass it.
I struggled for a while and come out of the water to take breaths a few times, then I realized I am only getting farther rather than closer. I couldn’t see anyone no longer.
That’s when I felt the fear,
I thought it is the end of the line.
It was only after we managed to get out that I started expressing emotions.
I laughed hysterically. A laugh that I could not stop.
It is so small
It reminds me of all the words that has been said to me and bothered me in the past, but I can’t tell what it is.
the things that one can’t either tell what they are, or forget them completely.
when I remember them it hurts.
I can’t tell what this is but I’ll try to see it as something bright and good.
When it gets repeated. It makes me anxious.
I can’t tell what this is. I am sure it’s inside of a room.
It’s like when you try to find an excuse for all the things that has disturbed you to get rid of them, and to make things transparent.
It is in a very small place, Maybe inside someone’s head?!
Slowly a dark shadow comes and takes over
Sometimes it gets darker. In the beginning it’s confusing and upsetting. But slowly, and slowly it starts illuminating and it opens up. This is like a knot, one knot after another one.
It is a room, with a few poles. I don’t know where this room is.