Azin Seraj
Graduate Student

Contact information

Email: azin.seraj@gmail.com

Group: Department of Art Practice

Web site: http://www.yayahstudios.com/hubbubweb/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=53

Personal statement

Azin Seraj’s installations and video work are informed by the culture of poetry in her home country of  Iran; by music that she became exposed to so early in life, by the borders and boundaries that she has migrated across in terms of places, cultures and the experiences of life’s joys and suffering. Her works are transporting as well as present making. Her patience invokes a strange sensation that the camera is gifting itself to space. Within these spaces she depicts a world of active existing. Her lens finds itself at intersections where the poetry, the musicality of moving image, threads itself though the vividness of the everyday. 

There is a seamless quality to her soundscapes. The moving images become musical chords that dip into this poignant fluidity of audio. Her work is visual music and visceral moving images. The videos are zones of emotional reception, punctuated by moments of criticality and cerebral focus.  

In Seraj’s work metaphor is air, is water -it seeps into meaning, into agency and then back out again, leaving its echoes, its residues on the materiality of the subject. There is a recognition that stories unfold into many stories. We believe in what the video camera is showing us because the images (the places, the objects, the people, the atmosphere) are passing across the lens on their own accord. Her camera moves through space; exists in space. It wills itself to live with the same integrity of presence as the images that materialize before the lens: the birds, the staircases, the doors, the humans, the traffic, the light. The video camera as a participant is neither greater nor less important then the subjects depicted. This aspect of Seraj’s work touches on emotional states of existing that in turn bring the experience of her videos back into the body of the viewer and into the materiality of the viewing space.