Nazar

Collaboration: Video and installation by Utsa Hazarika, performance by Nooshin Rostami
Venue: TIFA Working Studios, Pune, India
Year: 2016
Based on the installation: Dresser (an instance of object)

The dresser used in this work is a vintage piece of art deco furniture, traditionally tied to women's appearance and the idea of femininity. The performance subverts those associations, along with the internalized misogynistic gaze bound up in them, reclaiming the female subject's agency by having the artist act on the dresser rather than letting the dresser's implied gaze act on the subject. It works against the passivity typically implied by a dresser and the seat placed before it.

By dismantling that arrangement, and using the dresser's parts in ways they weren't intended for, the performance undoes the dresser as a fixed object. The video draws on the philosophy of W.V.O. Quine, who dismantles object oriented ways of thinking by treating objects as things that happen rather than things that simply are. Breaking the unity of form, in both the object and the video itself, allows each to be seen as an instance or occurrence of its own scattered parts.

The title, Nazar, carries multiple associations across Farsi, Hindi, and Urdu, including vision, sight, perspective, point of view, the evil eye, opinion, and watching over something. Together these meanings suggest an active form of looking, a sight that also acts. Here, that active gaze points toward a critical way of seeing beyond physical form, implicit in the dismantled dresser, its subverted gaze, and the female subject's reclaimed agency.

The installation, Dresser (an instance of object), on which this video is based, is documented here:
vimeo.com/168522830 (Highlights)