Farhad Kalantary: The Day of Removal, 2010. Video, 6:00 min, image courtesy the artist and OtherIS.
Farhad Kalantary works with film and video installations in a structural mode where imaging approaches abstraction. With a cultural insight gained through empathy, his works move freely between different cultural paradigms — he is of Azerbaijani-Iranian origin, educated in the US, and now lives in Norway. His films and videos explore spaces of living, work, and transit, often via the tension between sound and image that conveys the crisis of time and space, the anxiety of speed, the instabilities of vision, and the inherent violence of spaces that appear mundane. In The Day of Removal, a part of a trilogy entitled Trails of Water Behind a Passing Boat, we see three men working with jackhammers. The sequence is first slowed down, then it speeds up gradually as sequences are shortened by a steady removal of frames. An extensive presentation of Kalantary’s work is currently on view at Stenersen Museum, Oslo, in a video installation entitled The New Beginning, comprised of twenty distinct filmic segments. Kalantary is also an independent curator, and leads the artists-run space Atopia in Oslo.