BURN
BEFORE
READING

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
• Has Critical Art Practice praising strength and resistance of women
• Watches as the 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