Ordinary people from off the street, friends and even the artist himself have posed within a stark white environment to form Behrouz Rae’s collection of photographic works entitled (UTO): Utopia Trust Oath. This has been an ongoing project for Rae that begun in 2005 and draws from his personal reading of Plato’s descriptions of Utopia – a perfect state of social and political harmony.1 The subjects in these images were sourced and photographed in Spain, Iran and Azerbaijan and were invited to wear the clothes that once belonged to persons now deceased.
In strange and beguiling poses, they appear detached – both alienated and alien. Their eyes are glazed with either a menacing darkened and reflective surface or the equally disturbing effects of pure white. An enquiry with the artist as to the meaning of the eyes being either blackened or whitened reveals, that it is representative of the traits of both good and evil that can be found within all members of the human population. It is also a comment on the inability for us to see in reality – the state of perfection: Utopia.
Utopia is a fiction – a theoretical construct. In the fictional Utopian world that Rae has created, each subject inhabits a white space of potential and we the viewer, must use our imagination to explore its limitless dimensions – its possibilities. In having his models wear the clothes of people now dead, the artist addresses the evolution of social and cultural history and reminds us that we are all part of humanity’s undoing of, or progression toward, a utopian state.
Today, the notion of place as a geographical location has lost its currency. As a consequence of globalization the world is rapidly growing into a ‘non-place’.2 Stripped of their surroundings, these individuals inhabit a new world – a world of paradox. Is this the perfect place or a non-place?3 The white evokes a sense of the heavenly, the after-life and new potential.
It is a comfort that Rae‘s Utopia allows for all walks of life – office workers, guitarists, explorers, policemen, even joggers, and yet we sense that something sinister lurks behind their mysterious visage. They are certainly not of this world. It is this intoxicating mix of striking theatrical imagery, with a disarming sense of dislocation that confounds and jolts the viewer.
Claire Watson
Curator
November 2008
Published by: Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale
Exhibition Dates: 22 November to 14 December 2008
Behrouz Rae was born in Sumgait, Azerbaijan. He now lives and works in Tehran, Iran. In 2006 he completed a B.A degree in Photography, Azad University, Tehran, Iran. He has exhibited extensively internationally including: Europe, London and the US. He is represented by commercial Galleries based in London and Geneva. He was artist in residence at Cowwarr Art Space, Cowwarr, Victoria, Australia in November 2008.
- Plato (B 424-347 BC) wrote extensively on a perfect social and political world in his book “Republic” (400 BC). In 1516, Sir Thomas Moore named this perfect world as “Utopia”. ↩
- Human interaction and communication is governed more by the connection of satellites for mobile phones, or video and internet modes of communication than face –to- face contact within a fixed geographical location. The term ‘non-place’ was coined by Marc Auge in: Non Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London, Verso, 1995 ↩
- Perhaps it can be both – the word itself “Utopia” suggests a double-meaning as it is a synthesis of the syllable ‘ou’, meaning “no”, and topos, meaning ”place”. However, the homonymous prefix ‘eu’ also resonates in the word and its meaning is “good”. The implication of this is that the “Utopia” – the perfectly “good place” – is really “no place” (http://dictionary .reference.com). This same paradox can be found in Rae’s work. ↩