Nazanin Noroozi’s art tests the reliability of archives, which, although themselves under the influence of volatility, are still capable of shaping our collective memories. She is particularly interested in the archaeology of technology and thus employs elements and graphics from early computer games.
In The Riptide, the artist deals with themes including instability and uncertainty. From her perspective, meteorites represent elements beyond human control, and therefore, she sees such objects as highly suited motifs for expressing notions of instability and uncertainty. A further characteristic of Noroozi’s most recent work is the use of “blurriness” as a key strategy.
The Riptide is part of a short film trilogy that she has been working on for the past two years. Based on super 8 movies which her father took in the late 70s in post-revolution Iran, each of the three films in the trilogy consists of over 600 single frames. The films utilize handmade cinema as well as printmaking, drawing, and stop-motion animation techniques as a means to both re-imagine history and collective memory as well as to create broken narratives. The found footage and images of forces of nature, such as floods by the shore of the Caspian Sea or imaginary asteroids orbiting around a melting glacier, are manipulated multiple times both digitally and manually to form a reliable spectrum for exploring notions of failure, resistance, and instability. The artwork, The Ridge, uses graphics and images of Battlezone and Starwars Attars, both popular arcade games that were among the first shooting games that emerged at the end of the analog era in the 1980s.
