Samira Yamin‘s practice contends with the position of the diasporic subject as both object and viewer of representation. In the studio she engages in the slow, ethical labor of cultivating a critical and dynamic relationship to photographs of war, a practice of viewership with an eye toward the political ramifications of representation while nurturing an affective, loving gaze toward the individual lives represented and at stake. Making the work is a mode of research, interrogating the representations that construct, narrate, and perpetuate the very wars that displaced her family from Iran. The objects she makes are a small, but necessary, part of her work: trying to intervene upon a system that depends on concealing its own structure, whose stakes are profound and global in nature, but which turn, in large part, on something so seemingly banal as a magazine one reads while waiting at the dentist’s office.
Image: Samira Yamin, (Geometries) Fire VII, 2017. Hand cut TIME Magazine pages. 15 3/4 x 10 3/8 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.