Lot 119: Mitra Tabrizian , Iranian Untitled (From Beyond the Limits Series) cibachrome print

signed, titled, dated 2000 and numbered 4/5 on a label affixed to the reverse cibachrome print

measurements note 124 by 177cm.; 48 3/4 by 69 5/8 in.

London, Tate Britain, Mitra Tabrizian, 2008

Exhibition catalogue, London, Tate Modern, Street And Studio: An Urban History of Photography, 2008, p. 123

'Success depends not on what you know, but who you know. The secret of 'selling' is no longer the idea, but what image to project. Art is reduced to nothing but an 'aesthetic harassment.' Mitra Tabrizian, May 2000
Depicting business suit clad men and women in eerily staged scenes set in industrial or commercial venues devoid of human touch, Tabrizian's glossy and colour-saturated series Beyond the Limits (2000-2001) explores the post-modern identity of the businessman and the harrowing conditions of contemporary, corporate life. Betraying the artist's disillusionment with the excessive functionalism of the present and future, these photos scathingly reveal the cracks in the unsound machine and mechanisms of capitalism, technological advancement and modern-day living. Acting as existentialist representations of current times, Tabrizian's models robotically pose in clinical compositions where everything seems to run smoothly but for a few disturbing elements; these elements expose the actual madness of the cold and artificial reality that we live in, the absurdity of our existence in such a reality, and the effect that this existence has on us in psychological terms. In Beyond the Limits, as Stuart Hall suggests, Tabrizian investigates a "[...]world without affect, an emotionally hollow, 'indifferent' universe, which, lacking any critical distance on itself, subjective inside or constitutive outside has gone beyond its limits." ( Mitra Tabrizian, Beyond The Limits, Göttingen 2004, p. 54) Tabrizian's bizarre and incongruous compositions may be referring, in this way, to the writings of the French critic and sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard has noted that we are progressively moving towards a world in which the basic signs and meanings of the systems in place are being pushed to their limits, to the point where they result in the opposite of what they are intended to do: in an erasure of reality and an annihilation of sense. For the present work, Tabrizian invited a group of professional actors and non-actors to execute his scenarios, purposely employing individuals with a disparate range of performing abilities as a way of commenting on the act of selling oneself and on how some of us are better at selling ourselves than others. Part of Beyond the Limits, this photograph depicts a group of business-suited persons in the sterile setting of the white cube art gallery; the actors and non-actors congregate in twos and threes around the space and appear to be engaged in conversation. Ironically, the walls of the gallery are empty; there is no art on display. The photograph may be interpreted as a critique of the art industry's commercialization then, a commercialization in line with that of everything else. Moreover, the characters in the scene seem to be occupied in the spectacle of discussion more so than its content. This can be inferred from their exaggerated postures and expressions, their meticulously designed distribution into groups and their almost identical mode of dress. Through visual signs that allude to the culture of pretence and social upkeep that pervades today, the artist may be addressing the contemporary practice of the performance of identity, in other words, the assumption of roles by individuals in modern day society based on stereotypes and expectations.