Borders are an imaginary line

Borders are an imaginary line
Audiovisual Installation 00:18:11
Bak Gallery, Utrecht, Netherlands
2022-2023

“Borders Are an Imaginary Line” is part of an ongoing collaboration between Meshkat Talebi and Olivier Terpstra that combines prose, moving image, soundscapes and music to create an immersive audio-visual installation. Their process is gradual, it grows like a conversation and starts with a recording of Talebi reading a piece of her writing, perhaps accompanied by some moving image suggesting a time or a place. Terpstra responds with a soundscape, a gesture or an effect. The conversation grows, call and response, refine and revise. They create a space to share their dialogue and offer the personal as political in a bid to explore complex and often divisive issues with a deep personal impact.

By utilizing diverse audio-visual archives, the intention was to explore how the body carries the history of women's resistance and its interconnectedness across generations.

This installation contained four hanging screens made by fabric. The videos comprised a blend of my personal video archives, internet data from various protest timelines—some of which Talebi experienced firsthand— and recordings she made during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran while being in diaspora. Each screens were presenting different videos, linked subjectively with each other.

Sound played a pivotal role in crafting a space that oscillates between presence and absence. The surrounding sound, served as a conduit to evoke history in detached from its roots.

The use of both Talebi’s mother tongue and English echoes a profound sense of navigating between two distinct realms, each characterized by its own life rhythms and cultural landscapes. This duality reflects the sense of in-betweenness experienced through language confusion, symbolizing Talebi’s existence in two distinct mental and physical states simultaneously.

This project involved a live performance during the exhibition time in which Talebi and Terpstra challenge themselves to enact their working process live, sharing their dialogue of personal narrative, embodied language, shared sonic spaces and gestures in a bid to activate language, body and memory together with the audience.

Borders are an imaginary line
Live performance 00:15:00
Bak Gallery, Utrecht, Netherlands
2022-2023