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Shahryar Nashat: defier l'optimisme du pouvoir.

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Shahryar Nashat: defying power's optimism

The spectacle of the forces of order exercising their "right" to violence is an event as contradictory as it is terrible. Anyone who has witnessed such a scene--at a demonstration, in a subway passageway, on TV, anywhere--is familiar with the unpleasant sensation of menace that those who are theoretically there to protect us represent. In an article written in 1921 on the relations between violence, justice and the law, Walter Benjamin mused about the very meaning of a right to violence and the possibility of distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate violence. These questions have to do with the problem of the state's monopoly on violence which, for Benjamin, has a two-fold function: this violence both establishes and preserves the law. (1) The problem thus arises of the means democratic states use to maintain their control over this function of violence, a function which consists precisely in protecting law itself. The question of the state's various repressive apparatuses is clearly central to this issue. Some works by Shahryar Nashat, a Swiss artist of Iranian descent now living in Paris, enquires into the forms that this monopoly of violence has taken through an examination of different historical periods in which state violence has shown its most brutal face.

Staatsgewalt (2004) is part of a series of works exploring the more or less direct violence carried out by institutional power sites. This question is not raised simply in order to denounce it, but also to explore its psychic implications, thereby considerably broadening the possibilities the viewer has to confront this violence. The title that Nashat has given to this work is already an implicit questioning of the nature of this power and the violence it carries out. In German, Staatsgewalt is a term used to describe state power or authority. Its meaning, however, inevitably calls to mind the two terms which make it up, Staat and Gewalt, or "state" and "violence." The fact that the term "violence," in this combination of words, becomes synonymous with power or authority suggests that the various meanings overlap. Out of this semantic complexity, Nashat enquires into the way in which power is transformed into violence. While the German word designates the state's repressive apparatus, with its various police and judicial components, it also implies the power it has over citizens. Through the installation Staatsgewalt Nashat poses questions about the very nature of this power and its inevitable involvement in violence.

The work is based on a precise incident: Rodney King being worked over by four Los Angeles policemen in March 1991. Nashat has appropriated the famous images secretly filmed by George Holliday which, once they were broadcast on television, provoked riots against the racist behaviour of the police. In his use of this episode, Nashat has given it an interpretation both aesthetic and critical. The installation is made up of three parts. In an initial space, a voice describes the lynching scene-by-scene as it is re-broadcast. The radio-like quality of this narration is inspired by sports commentary and imitates the typical way of describing in the most detail possible all of an athlete's actions:

King begins to get up from his hands and knees. King is up and charges in the direction of Powell; Powell hits King in the shoulder area with his baton and King falls on his face.

In the next room, some fifty fluorescent neon light bulbs are hung from the ceiling, forming a menacing-looking sculptural ensemble that dearly recalls the number of blows landed on King. Finally, the film of the beating is projected on a small monitor in a room to the side that is plunged in darkness. As the commentary progresses, the image, at first stationary, becomes increasingly dear. Only when the voice falls silent does the viewer discover, in a deafening silence, the police brutality that had been falsified in the sports commentary. The end of the commentary sets off the beginning of the short sequence that shows King being lynched. This set-up, which consists in revealing the reality of what had been announced in the previous room, provokes a traumatic reaction in the viewer, who gradually recognizes the image on the screen. The brutality of this spectacle is just as abrupt as the codified violence round in sports. What is repressed and displaced in this discourse and in the aesthetic of the mise en scene rises up again in the image with all the more violence.

With its use of amateur film footage and its questioning of the state's repressive apparatus, Italian Studies (2004) is undoubtedly closely related to Staatsgevaalt. This piece was created by Nashat when he was in Rome on a Swiss Institute grant. Perhaps the context of Berlusconi's Italy, with the terrible events at the G8 meeting in Genoa still fresh in mind, pushed Nashat to examine certain episodes in Italian history in the latter half of the twentieth century. He thus carried out (deliberately fragmentary and subjective) research into the link between state repression and protest movements. The work is comprised of an installation in three parts, which this time occupy the same space and directly interact with one another.

Italian Studies, Nos. 1-5 is made up of five vertical panels in which rive liquid crystal screens have been installed These screens project different looped sequences: dashes between the police and demonstrators during the revolt at the Faculty of Architecture in Rome; images of carabinieri training sessions; images of police repression in Genoa during the G8; and, finally, images of young men masturbating. Many of these images come from the Archivo Movimento Operaio in Rome. The second part of the installation, No Title (1:1), is based on letters from fighters in the Italian resistance against Nazism and fascism who have been sentenced to death. The letters have been transcribed, laser printed and mounted on the walls behind the panels. Finally, the third part of the installation, Ends and Beginnings, is a sound recording made up of fragments of Italian films from 1940 to 1970. The installation as a whole is bathed...

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