Disruption

During this strange and unparalleled time, images seem to form as moments from a vague dream, a distant future, or an uncertain past and fill our minds. They play out like scenes from post-apocalyptic films.

I worked with digital photos I took of an empty New York City, capturing the moments during the lockdown. I re-photographed them with a medium-format camera, first burning each frame with an uneven splash of light just before they settled into existence to produce 6×6 film slides. This work is about disrupting the process of becoming, metaphorically recreating the experience of the interrupted potential to form new memories at this time. Each image represents not only the interruption but also the destruction of memory before it fully forms.

The project features two distinct aspects:

• Eighteen archival pigment prints transferred from film slides to digital, framed in black, in two sizes: 50 × 50 cm and 100 × 100 cm.

• Forty-two 12.5 × 12.5 cm light boxes presenting film slides in bronze-finish frames, each with a unique lighting program.

Disruption, New York, 2020-23 © Tooraj Khamenehzadeh