Hoda Zarbaf | "Front Camera / Back Camera"
Dastan virtually presents a work by Hoda Zarbaf titled “Front Camera / Back Camera”. Made in 2017 as part of the We Are Image-making Machines series, the piece features two projections of the artist and her thoughts. It reveals Zarbaf’s state of “self” reflection versed by the gaze of her ego. Together, the two unfeigned projections exhibit a rather harrowing conversation between the self as “I,” the subjective knower, and the self as “Me,” the known object.
Courtesy of Hoda Zarbaf Estate
Curator's Note:
Hoda Zarbaf, without any doubt, is cemented in art history as a prolific artist. Her work reveals a complex inner existence, which Hoda bravely confronted through introspection. She may have left us abruptly and in shock, but through art, she has also left vivid traces of her thoughts, emotions, and memories for us to find in the years to come. True to form, in Front Camera/Back Camera, Hoda visually sculpts her existential agony. Immortalizing her internal contradiction, it is as if she has now passed onto the essence of the medium she often used: the found ephemera that maintains individual human traces.
May we always honour her memory.
Sanam Samanian