Discreetly Living Behind Your Face Pooya Abbasian, Ali Ostovar, Andrea Kofinas

The exhibition Discreetly living behind your face results from a project undertaken by Pooya Abbasian for more than 5 years. His approach, both sensible and plastic, opens as a well a reflexion on social norms and the search for an identity through alterity.
Inspired by the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky and José Luis Guerín, his work challenges photography and plays with the grid driving images’ creation and diffusion. Both a eulogy of the contemporary pixel and a reclaiming of the old cyanotype method, he intends to preserve the digital trace on analogue prints. Maybe more of a painter than a photographer, Pooya Abbasian celebrates the poetry of the poor image, a blurriness that gives room to imagination. Original prints, pictures found on the internet and film shots make up a very personal iconography, freed from genre imperatives.
Taken on the sly, from the back, and playing with environmental constraints, the pictures are the impressions of a benevolent voyeur. The poetry is to be found in his obsession for keeping his models’ identity secret: he is not interested in the verdict given by face features but rather by the harmony of neck’s lines.

Abbildung: Pooya Abbasian