"the best film in Savirón’s program, and the single biggest discovery in this year’s Museum of the Moving Image program, comes from Iranian-Irish filmmaker Atoosa Pour Hosseini. Mirage is a deceptively simple study of a set of fragments of a landscape. Muddy puddles and hilltops in a pinhole haze, we soon see these same images funneled through reverberating sprocket holes, yellow light pouring through the edges of the grainy, black and white earth. The nearly silent film reverses its terms, with the landscape getting sucked into a rogue sprocket and vibrating horizontally, plunging up and down like the needle in a sewing machine. And then, suddenly, the apparatus asserts itself: the Super 8 projector clacks, and we see the red stripe of end leader bisecting the visual field. Are these artifacts “invasions” of an otherwise unified terra firma? Or is it this very instability that defines this locale?
And did I mention that Pour Hosseini accomplishes all of this in a mere four minutes? A propulsive yet painterly film that never lets up, Mirage does in fact dissipate the closer you get to it. And now, as we are assaulted by all manner of pigheaded certainty in the media and the political sphere, it is that much more of a relief that Mirage thwarts easy assimilation. If we mean to resist, after all, it may be necessary to resist meaning."
-Michael Sicinski, MUBI Notebook "On Resistance" at First Look Festival, New York 2017
Atoosa Pour Hosseini (b. Tehran, Iran 1981) is an artist-filmmaker based in Dublin, Ireland. Her work, which is influenced by historical avant-garde cinema, explores questions about illusion, reality, and perception through the media of film, video, installation and performance art. She works with the material textures of 8mm film as well as digital processes to explore layers of space and time, superimposing imagery and creating entrancing patterns of repetition with startling interruptions.
She holds a MA in Fine Art Media from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and a BA in Fine Art Painting from the Azad University of Art and Architecture, Tehran. She has received awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, Dublin City Council, Culture Ireland, and Temple Bar Gallery and Studios.
She is a member of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, and a Co-Director of the Experimental Film Society (EFS) which is an Irish company dedicated to the production and screening of experimental cinema, and frequently participates in discussion forums and exchanges, such as the LUX Critical Forum in Dublin.
Her works have been shown in many galleries, museums, festivals, and showcases throughout the world, in countries such as Iran, Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, USA, The Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Greece, Croatia, Brazil, Colombia, Portugal and Estonia. Her work forms part of the Irish and International Institutes collection as well as private collections.
Pour Hosseini moved to Ireland in 2006 and currently lives and works in Dublin.
