With a strong sense of pictorial critique, the work of Azar Alsharif (b. 1984, Bushehr/Bergen) draws attention to the language of advertisement in glossy women’s magazines and their legacy as powerful machines for subconscious desire. Here in display are works from her exhibition “Grains of Golden Sand” at Kunsthall Oslo, where the artist presented a series of collages shuffled with the cut-up freshness of her personal intuition on surface readings. In these images, we can see an overlap of close-ups of anonymous perfume bottles and natural landscapes, where the liquids in the jars merge with the cloudy horizons of forests or oceanic landscapes. A cosmic seductiveness lends these images an epidermal feel, overlapping various ethereal substances whose scents we try to divine.
Alsharif's collages occasionally expand into spatial installations, such as Witnessing History (2015), where mirrored images of deserts are applied in parallel, in a Rorschach-style landscape. In this installation, the viewer is invited into a state of pure immersion, where the intensity of the experience of seeing is combined with an immense field of unconscious associations.
Filled with market seduction, Alsharif's work revisits the strategies of advertising and the film industry, addressed by the Pictures Generation—a US-based visual art movement that re-invented pop imagery by appropriating and using the edition process of images in an analytic manner. Borrowing the associative intelligence of this tradition of image critique, exemplified by artists such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, and with a strong penchant toward the slick aesthetic of the 1980s, the artist collects and rearranges archival material in continuous permutations of trivialities and discoveries. Zoomed surfaces overlap ethereal landscapes and cropped horizons, configuring the shapes of unseen products. These emerge from the hybrid visual textures produced by magazine covers just as much as from the artist’s haptic sensibility for collage. MM
self-presentation:
Looking back, I can clearly see how MTV in the 90s was a very overwhelming experience, and at the same time a very fascinating one. Music, especially the lyrics, but also literature and poetry in the classroom, caught my interest at an early age. Some of the most important experiences in my life, which have led to working as an artist, are growing up as bicultural, on the move, and in a world of exploding pop-culture and media, which I share with an entire generation. My years at various art schools and, last but not least, all the movies I've seen also deserve mentioning. All the fictions that have accompanied me through life and taught me about life have a big place in my heart and memory as producers of reality equal to reality itself. False is more than real.
