Mitra Tabrizian: This is That Place

by Mary Phelan

Mitra Tabrizian: This is That Place
4 June - 10 August 2008
Tate Britain - Admission Free

Mitra Tabrizian was born in Tehran. She is a film-maker and photographer who lives and works in London. She has made five films and her photographs have been travelling the world in no fewer than twenty-eight exhibitions since 1985. Eight of these have been solo, as is exhibition twenty-nine, Mitra Tabrizian: This is That Place, now open at Tate Britain.

According to Rose Issa, curator of the exhibition, New Wave Iranian Cinema has influenced Tabrizian. This has transformed Iranian film in the last two decades and its cinematic language champions the poetry in everyday life and the ordinary person by blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, feature film and documentary.(Press copy)

Road to Nowhere from the series Borders 2005 - 2006

There is certainly a filmic quality about many of these nineteen images, an eerie, Edward Hopperish quality of something just having happened, or just about to happen. Three of these photographs are titled Lost Time, described as a critique of corporate culture where youth is fetishised and the middle-aged find themselves increasingly unwanted and forced into early retirement. The series portrays businessmen and women in their forties and fifties, dressed for work, yet seen in non-work places during work hours. (Press copy)

In one photo, an elegant blonde woman is sprawled on the side of a public road. Her fine suit and high-heeled shoes are at odds with her bitter surroundings. She gazes appealingly at us, compelling us to hazard a guess at what she is thinking. In another photo, a middle-aged man in an executive suit is lying full-length on the bare boards of the floor of an unfurnished room. His head is lying upon his briefcase and his eyes are averted from ours. We get the feeling that the briefcase holds – literally- the evidence of whatever predicament he is in.

Is he gone bankrupt? Has he sold his furniture to make ends meet? As you wander through the roll-call of photographed subjects; lost, lonely, broke or simply at odds with the worlds they occupy, you will ask many more questions than can ever be answered. Do not miss this thought-provoking exhibition.