From the Series Friday Evening - The White Cube 9

About the Artwork

Digital Photography - Digital Print on Photo Paper - Wood Frame and glass --- . In 1976 Brian O'Doherty, an Irish artist and critic, suggested the term “White Cube”, referring to contemporary gallery space, a space with plane white walls, simple, minimalistic architectural atmospheres, free of all possible prejudgemental elements; a neutral space for artworks in which spatial impacts are lessened to the minimum level. And here, these white cubes are decontextualising and they shelter us – at least for a few hours – in their safe havens, for we need to seek shelter from distresses of this city and our everyday life. And we spend our pathetic disgraceful Friday evenings in exhibition openings. And we attend joyous openings to support these art institutions. And we meet with our friends, we laugh and babble on. It is in these parties that we pass our gloomy Friday evenings. We go from one gallery to another and we get together with the same people. And thus, the gallery is both a safe haven in which we take refuge from mournful melancholic Friday evenings and a space for artists and their audience – who are artists themselves – to flourish. Then delighted, for we have fulfilled our intellectual and social responsibilities, we party yet again. White cube embraces us, frees us from our urban life and makes us go on content, enchanted and proud to follow our dreams. ‘Friday Evening: The White Cube’– a series of recklessly composed, overexposed, high contrasted photographs, taken at 3200 ISO – gives an ambiguous yet accurate account of our artists’ situation, a situation that above all this series and I had to tackle; a situation that we all have to deal with. But at the end of the day, it does nothing but nag in vain. Zarvan Rouhbakhshan