2938 Fraser Street, rear entrance
Vancouver, BC, V5T 3W1
Cinema
Katayoon Yousefbigloo
extended until 24 January 2026, by appointment only
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This new space by Unit 17 is dedicated to moving image, a longtime dream of the gallery to produce site-specific installations surrounding this material in an environment that is much more domestic than our usual gallery contexts. The space is built out as a more committed social space, with a coffee bar and stocked mini fridge, as well as snacks, with a slow rotation of presentations throughout the calendar year. Currently, three works are on view by Vancouver artist & musician Katayoon Yousefbigloo from 2022 that look to structures of encasement either by social authority and other technological devices.
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Yousefbigloo’s multi-media practice — which spans video, happenings, sculpture, installation, and music — utilize a dual method of mythologization and magic to probe into the ways in which seemingly quotidian media and narrativization shape our understanding of the world. These enquiries not only operate through the re-interpretation and re-shaping of signs and signifiers but also through the engagement with the apparatuses with which we consume said media as well as the way in which they form our spatial orientation of day-to-day life. The Blue Fence (2022) attests to the artist’s mode of questioning-via-art-practice, which entails taking seemingly finite or enclosed subjects to then trouble any pre-conceived notions of the subject.
In this film, we are presented by hand camera footage shot by the artist circling a blue fence at Vancouver’s Oppenheimer Park with an accompanying score by the artist. The majority of the film is shot from an upward-tilted angle and zoomed-in at the fence, disorienting any ability to discern the fence’s scale or location. Temporality, too, seems troubled in this film — an overcast sky and filtered light can equally read as dawn, sunset, or midday. The subject of the film, the fence at Oppenheimer Park, gestures towards a political flashpoint in the city. The park, which has long been an encampment site for the city’s unhoused, has repeatedly been the location of forced evictions. This fence indexes these forced removals, set up as a way of prohibiting the park’s residents from returning following a removal in 2019. Rather than presenting the fence as a symbol for clear-cut moralizing, Yousefbigloo presents the site as something as dizzying and complex as the issues it gestures to. The spikey iron fence is marked by a vaguely threatening quality, evoking punishment and containment. Here, the park as a site of urban leisure becomes troubled. Periodically interrupting footage of the fence are city of Vancouver traffic barriers and public signs speaking to the “redevelopment of the park”. However, through the disorienting camera work, we catch a glimpse of graffiti on the redevelopment signs, a kind of counter-messaging: “unceded territory”, “why do the politicians hide”, and “fuck city park security.” What becomes triangulated in the film is the tight relationships between colonial occupation and the problematics of the ways in which “public space” becomes closely bound with privatization and development, a dyad particularly relevant when considering the ways in which efforts to “clean up the city” are often the precursors to rampant development and gentrification.
Another film, CHESSMAN HAZARD CODECHANGE HOUSEHOLD (2022) operates along a similar vector, troubling the viewer’s understanding of space, but in this iteration, Yousefbigloo folds in the viewing apparatus — in this case, a car’s rearview monitor. The title derives itself from the artists’ repeated matra-like chanting of the Farsi phrase cheshmeh hasood beterekeh (may the evil eye burst) into the notes app. From this technique, Yousefbigloo isolated two other 33-letter words: “Metallica change my password better ok” and “pathetica cheshmazar shish manhasset”, which add up to 99 letters, the traditional number of prayer beads which point to the 99 names of Allah (the bracelet is hung with a lighter in the installation). This mantra is slowed and warped and plays as accompanying audio. What appears at first as a formal constraint through the use of the rearview monitor, becomes a gesture of humorous subversion. On the one hand, the monitor’s video capture technology is extremely limited by design, with limited playback capabilities, and meant to only capture footage from behind the car, ostensibly for insurance purposes should an accident occur. In this instance, Yousefbigloo has captured a short film in which the artist, shot from below the knees, urinates on a rubber car mat while a jilted, stuttering electronic track plays in the background. The video occupies an uneasy middle ground through the film’s voyeuristic qualities on the one hand, and a pranksterish subversion of the camera’s intended subject matter. The cold rationality of the camera is challenged by the film’s abject content but also through a subtle spiritualism; urine is used in some Zoroastrian rituals, a reading underscored by the film’s original installation in which the monitor was draped in a beaded necklace ending in an evil eye. When considering the artist’s exploration of how media produces narrativization, myth, and by extent, a conditioned understanding of history, we can turn here to theorist Marshall McLuhan's words concerning the so-called rearview mirror effect: “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
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Katayoon Yousefbigloo is an interdisciplinary artist and musician. Through video, music, writing and visual art, she examines how media shapes our mythologies. Reverse engineering cultural narratives, she uses speculative fiction as a framework through which to imagine alternate realities and their commercial potentials. Unrelatedly, she is pursuing franchise opportunities for her musical project Puzzlehead. Katayoon received a MFA from the School of Contemporary Arts at SFU, Vancouver.
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List of works, clockwise:
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CHESSMAN HAZARD CODE CHANGE HOUSEHOLD, 2022video (1:25) on rear-view mirror video monitor
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The Blue Fence (Around Oppenheimer Park), 2022mini DV video with sound, 8m7sSound design by Dave Biddle
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Stick/Kansas City, 2022
8.5 x 11" inkjet print, plastic, painter's tape, dimensions variable
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