Fatima Al Qadiri

A good friend flagged up this music video by the artist and music composer Fatima Al Qadiri. Both music and the video are just fantastic. I’ve attached the description for the video on YouTube, which positions the video as a piece of visual commentary as much as it is an accompaniment to the music (you can def read it as a critique on the objectification of young Arab women):

“Fatima Al Qadiri’s ‘How Can I Resist U’ is a love letter to London in general and Dubstep (before it wobbled) in particular. “Lenden” as it’s known has become a historic site of pilgrimage for wealthy Arabs seeking the forbidden fruits of sex, drugs and alcohol.”

If you are impressed enough with the video then go to her website. This woman is amazing.

http://fatimaalqadiri.com/

Lift – A 24 min Doc Movie

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Taryn Simon’s latest work Contraband, because I feel that not only is this a great work because of its actual content but because of the perception of the photographer in working out a particular point in space and time to focus on in order to make her point.

I discovered this amazing 24 minute documentary film called Lift recently, which uses the same technique although for a completely different end. In 2001 the film maker Marc Issacs set himself up in the elevator of a council estate (the phrase for project housing in England) in East London for 3 months and filmed whoever stepped in the space. As the time went on the residents became more familiar with him and started to reveal things about themselves which they wouldn’t have otherwise.

This 24 minutes is packed with characters and is an absolutely fascinating piece of social documentary. Highly recommended.

For those that are interested there’s a quick interview with the director which sheds some light on how he set this project up – here

Not to be Reproduced

Post portrait assignment I thought that this painting Not to be Reproduced by René Magritte was rather witty:

Not to be Reproduced, René Magritte, 1937

Points of confluence

I brought Taryn Simon’s latest project Contraband to the open tutorial session with Paul earlier this week. Basically Simon installed herself at two locations where contraband objects gather after being confiscated from passengers and packages before they enter the USA (these locations are the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the U.S. Postal Service International Mail Facility at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York). It’s pretty interesting and you can check quite a few photographs from the series on this interactive web page here. Simon’s website also has a summary of the project here.

I find Simon’s identification of these locations absolutely masterful. Not only has she identified a point at which visually intriguing objects gather, but she knew that by cataloguing these items they would become symbols of something that is much larger than the physical situation in which they were photographed; I honestly find that kind of photographic perception to be as exciting as the photographs themselves.

Bird Corpse

USA American Viagra

Sala, Pork Fat

Perfume and Cologne (counterfeit)