Trails of water behind a passing boat

Working primarily with the non-narrative, Kalantary's film and video works explore the sense of space, time and speed, the interactions of sound and image and the poetics of everyday life.

Farhad Kalantary (1962,Tabriz) is an Azerbaijani Iranian-American artist living in Oslo, who works with film, video and installations. He studied film and video art in San Francisco State University (BA, 1992) and San Francisco Art Institute (MFA, 1996). He has exhibited his works in various international film festivals as well as in galleries and museums in the US and Europe. His works are part of the collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden and The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway. Kalantary was the founder and coordinator of TopFloor, a workshop for film, video and digital art (98-01) in Trondheim, and he is co-founder and the leader of the project room Atopia (2003-) in Oslo.

We have worked with Kalantary on several projects, for his large solo exhibition at the Stenersen Museum in 2011, titled A New Beginning, the group exhibition BoundLess in 2005 and the production of his work Migrations for the exhibition 2 Move at the Stenersen Museum in 2008.

The artist himself writes about this exhibition:
"The three works in this exhibition have more than a few attributes in common. Firstly they all employ the bird's eye viewpoint and see everything from above buildings and bridges. Using this perspective they investigate patterns and traces of movement and speed. Secondly all the works in this exhibition have originated in the transit city of Istanbul, and thus pay homage to that city. Memories of Istanbul play a key role in this compilation.

My first visit to Istanbul was in the winter of 1982. I had arrived as a young asylum seeker from the political turmoil of Iran. As an illegal resident I kept out of sight and found shelter in the hideouts of the city for about a year until I made my way into Paris.

23 years later, for the second time I arrived in Istanbul through an artist residency. This time I did not have to be so invisible. I was on a journey to search for the lost time and for the traces of my earlier passage. Little did I know that the marks of the past are kept within the places, and all places eventually disappear in time. In due time all memories fade away but longing maintains its perpetual growth.

My search resulted in the discovery of many currents of speed and several traces of passage. But almost all that I found was in constant motion, and too short-lived to hold in grasp. They were like floating emotions over the horizon, or at best like the trails of water behind a passing boat.

For the artist residency during which these works were initiated I am grateful to the care and support of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA)."

Photo: Migrations (film stills)