CURATOR NOTE 

Making sense of the work in this exhibition requires a few bits about the life of the artist: 


MAHSA ALAFAR 

• Is born in Tehran, 2nd largest city in Middle East 
• Acts in Independent Iranian Cinema for 10 years 
• Gives TED talk about resisting victimhood 
• Lives on Island, starts women’s book club 
• 33 of 37 years lived on opposite side of earth 
• Enters US after a global pandemic to highly ranked Graduate Program 
• Marries American and moves from Chicago to MICHIGAN 
• Has Critical Art Practice praising strength and resistance of women 
 • Watches as most important woman's revolution in history occurs there 


 

In 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 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 tries to turn a  profit.  

Can we meditate a little? I see these  works from a Cagean perspective - where  observation of the sounds of city streets  and ambient commotion is more inspiring  than pop music endlessly competing for  airtime. In that way, these images 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 puts what I would call passé  Americana into a global perspective.  

The title is in reference to the 2008  screenplay Burn After Reading, which  highlights the incompetency of American  Intelligence Officers and civilians alike in  their conceited desire to profit from  classified documents. With the title Burn Before Reading, the satire is pushed one  step further. 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