Yellow Alert
War is an ominous phenomenon that has always involved the fate of human beings. Yet, despite the war, peace seems to be a fragile and transient state. The world’s superpowers while are talking of peace, busy with manufacturing and dealing with their latest deadly weapons of massacre hypocritically and consequently placing large parts of the world on the threshold of war beginning. This situation could be considered as a permanent “Yellow Alert”; The situation in which a war attack may happen but it is not certain.
“The Yellow Alert”, as it is perceivable by its title is a hybrid narrative of a state of betwixt; a state between peace and war, life and death, and “to be or not to be”. It is a transient situation which is happened between the state of attack and peace, that is neither this nor that. This is a collection that includes similar images made by juxtaposing irrelevant symbolic motives.
Symbols are basically about to address particular meanings. However, if they are taken apart from their context and are located in another one and in relation to other symbols, their content will also change to something uncanny. This is what a “collector” does; taking something from where it belongs, and put it in a new context and thus, giving it an uncanny meaning. Butterflies, for example, are supposed to be allegories of liberty, nature, and the beauty of life. Nevertheless, when they are “punched” in a collection, they convey the unbearable weight of death.
By juxtaposing the characteristics of the four symbols utilized in the Yellow Alert, our artist commixes their symbolic order. Hence, he creates hybrid images that are attractive while they are unpleasant, and charming while irritant. They seem to be aesthetic, while the results are unaesthetic. Lied on ornamental golden backgrounds, bodies of bombs and butterflies are merged and both convey the weight of death and life simultaneously. Meanwhile, a line in the middle creates a border between the left and the right. Nonetheless, the line is a slit in the body of these symbolic combinations to discover what they have hidden within themselves.
Behrang Samadzadegan