Gohar Dashti
Self-Portrait
2005
Text
Pouya KarimIn the Abundance of Loss
The worn mirror sits on the lifeless frame of the mantelpiece. On the mirror's
surface, the face is erased and the sight wiped away and consequently the
subject’s visage is reflected ghostly and incomplete within the liminal light
of self-awareness. It is as if the scratches and stains on the mirror have
crookedly and falsely marked the frame of representation so that the subject
never fully sees the ray of their own corporeality.
The images and frames around the mirror evoke history and signify that
the subject’s gaze is never inscribed in a timeless and placeless void. The
emergence of diverse frames inevitably alters and inverts their language and
conceals their corporeal reflection amid the heterogeneous intermingling of
historical signs. For this reason, the self-portrait is always an image of the
subject, forged between self and other, presence and absence, and the longing
for clarity and the inevitability of darkness. It creates its true essence in
the abundance of loss: half in the light and half
in the dark, like a light in the fog.