A human figure veiled from head to foot, the original surroundings cut out by computer and replaced with pure white. A black, patterned chador is draped fluidly around the figure, who appears to be kneeling in prayer, and whose position alters slightly from image to image. Another motif, smaller this time, shows the same figure, from the chest upwards, again in slightly different positions. The figure in the chador is a man. He has no face. Instead, the viewer is confronted with the back of a shaven head, a smooth, skin-coloured protuberance that has no identity, human figure reduced to mere form.
The series leads the viewer into a black-and-white non-space in which the harsh silhouettes of the bodies appear as absurd manifestations of a sterile world. Almost life-size, the rear view of a man’s head in a chador addresses us with an immediacy that demands a fearless response. And beneath the veil, we glimpse an offer so deceptively obvious that it might be an advertisement. What irony that holds for those who immediately “understand” Forouhar’s super-signs of alienation.
The figures are sitting in a world detached, a world that cuts through pathos with a well-honed scalpel. Literally. Of course, we can go along with that. But it is precisely because they seem so strange and so funny and so rigidly immobile in the face of their own inherent potential that our gaze tries to avoid the close-up, and we start looking around for other expressions of reality. As we step back, we see the space Forouhar has occupied in a new context. Sometimes in full, sometimes in profile, these blind spots in the robes mark a hitherto unknown body area.
On any given map, a blind spot would mark an uncharted area. Yet this cannot be proven as long as no-one has been there and documented it. Phyllis Kiehl
Blind Spot – Sitting Figure
Series of photographs, 2001, digital print on Alu Dibond, all 110 X 150 cm
Blind Spot – Portraits
Series of photographs, 2001, digital print on Alu Dibond, all 45 X 60 cm
Blind Spot billboards, 2nd Berlin Biennale, 2001
Blind Spot, Ausstellungshalle Schulstrasse 1A, Frankfurt, 2002
He kills me, He kills me Not II, City Gallery Neunkirchen, 2013
Blind Spot, Ausstellungshalle Schulstrasse 1A, Frankfurt, 2002
Parade, Kunsthalle Vierseithof, Lueckenwalde, 2008
