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WEIGHTLESS
From March 7 until March 29, 2009
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" I am not a bird lover or a bird watcher. I have a recurring dream. I've had this dream since I was a little girl living in a narrow alley east of Tehran. In my dream I fly. Not exactly like a bird but like myself without the weight. I press my feet to the ground and take off. Weightless, I enter a space that is real but different.
This other place is where I am when I'm not here. My images come from these dreams.
I was running ahead of a line of neighborhood children in the narrow alley where I lived as a child. As I ran faster and faster, running became easier and my feet lifted off the ground. The children who were running behind me also floated in the air. They were hanging onto a rope that I pulled in the air effortlessly.
That was the first dream.
It is not only the weightlessness, nor the floating in the air that fascinate me in these dreams. It is the transformation of my physical context.
Detached from the earth, I enter a world familiar to my body in an ancient and embracing way. Forests with tall trees seen from above followed by shallow bodies of water smooth and gentle. Without frear, I hover over vast plains that merge into steep valleys, knowing that I will not fall.
Colors merge and details transform into each other. Large castles and tall buldings become accessible from all sides. Rules don't apply in my flying dreams and all is in transition.
When I was about 8, holding in my hand my father's black umbrella, I jumped from the second floor balcony of our house. My hope was to fly away instead of landing paintfully in the backyard.
Later, when I was 10, I saw television for the first time. One of the first images I saw on the screen was of a runner played in slow motion. The runner's body lifted in the air gently in between his steps as if weightless and landed back on the earth softly as if it was optional.
Not aware of slow motion technology, I was mesmerized by the runner's control over his body. As he moved through the air, the world around him changed . Details disappeared and colors merged. The runner moved in a world that lifted his body and held it floating before letting it down gently.
I spent many days imitating the slow runner's movements in the same backyard I had landed on earlier form my unsuccessful fligh from the second floor balcony.
For many years now, I have been creating an inventory of images that reference that place I inhabit in my flying dreams. Pigeons, living their parallel lives among city dwellers, have been frequent subjects. I watch them push their little red feet to the ground and lift up into a space that is shared, but is inaccessible to us. I imitate their flight with my camera. My images are my attempts at describing this other place."
Yassaman Ameri
January 2009
Montreal
:: About Yassaman Ameri ::
Yassaman Ameri is a photographer and multimedia artist. Her work has been exhibited at the Leighton House Museum in London, as well as Espace Electra in Paris, as part of the Regards Persans exhibition. Ameri grew up in Tehran and come to Canada after the Iranian revolution in 1979. Her work to date has focuses on the concepts of home and exile, as well as on the constructed nature of history. Weightless, is more personal series, is Ameri's most recent work.
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