Mahsa
Alafar

BURN BEFORE READING

CURATOR NOTE FOR BURN BEFORE READING EXHIBITION• Is born in Tehran, 2nd largest city in Middle East• Acts in Independent Iranian Cinema for 10 years• Gives a TED talk about resisting victimhood• Lives on an Island, starts a women's book club• 33 of 37 years lived on the opposite side of Earth• Enters the US after a global pandemic into a highly ranked Graduate Program• Has Critical Art Practice praising the strength and resistance of women• Watches as the most important women's revolution in history occurs thereIn thinking about comparisons between images taken before and after emigration, one cannot go without thinking of the phrase "land of opportunity." As Herbert Marcuse (a German immigrant) finds in his 1964 One-Dimensional Man, I imagine the conception of "America the Beautiful", as bountiful and limitless, is RUINED when we find out that the subversive books supposedly inciting revolution are on sale at the convenience store for $7.99. This society doesn't evolve or implode from the threats to it, but it absorbs them and then tries to turn a profit. Can we meditate a little? I see these works from a Cagean perspective, where the observation of the sound of city streets and ambient commotion is more inspiring than pop music endlessly competing for airtime. In that way, these images by Mahsa Alafar are not brilliant or explainable in themselves like those you find in National Geographic. Instead, Alafar finds the absurdity in contemporary migratory life by changing the rubric that judges it. This 10-year span of work definitively puts what I would call passé Americana into a global perspective. The title Burn Before Reading is a reference to the 2008 screenplay Burn After Reading, which highlights the incompetence of American Intelligence Officers and civilians alike in their conceited desire to profit from classified documents. The title's satire is pushed one step further here, implying that we should now burn something without reading it first. Stumbling upon lucrative information in 2025, let alone looking at images in a gallery, wouldn't stay in our awareness for longer than a few minutes anyway. Burn Before Reading pokes at our ever-decreasing attention spans and implies that we are even more obstinate now when we dismiss ideas outside our own algorithms.-Michael Parsons Powell