Moving Image
'The Golden Mask (20 mins, Super 8mm, Ireland, Germany, Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina, 2020)
Atoosa Pour Hosseini’s The Golden Mask draws on one of civilization’s most ancient and potent objects, the mask, to explore psychic and territorial displacement. Magisterial yet marginal masked figures haunt edgeland spaces like refugees from a mysterious cataclysm. The eruptions of unsettling bursts of found footage and gloriously decaying images of ruins set these beings adrift in time as well as space. Ultimately, only the mask remains, golden and unchanging amidst the desolation of history. Excerpt
"Kinetics" (11 minutes, 16mm, Ireland, 2018)
The masked female figures that wander adrift through Pour Hosseini’s intensely lyrical explorations of displacement find their most energetic form in the bird-woman at the centre of Kinetics. Shot in saturated 16mm colour, this dreamlike film follows a primeval female figure exploring an ancient landscape poised over an endlessly blue sea. She is at once alienated from and engaged by her surroundings, which suggest a site of self-discovery as much as one of profound disorientation. Excerpt
"Refining the Senses" (12 minutes, Super & Standard 8mm, Switzerland, Iran & Ireland 2017)
The artist sits spinning wool at a site of memory as image and reminiscence fluctuate between the personal and the general, the pictorial and the material. Bodies wander, landscapes echo each other, and time is unwound through a carefully wrought approach to 8mm celluloid. Between the persistence and fragility of the moving image, the senses are refined. Excerpt
“Mirage” (4 minutes, Super8mm, Iran / Ireland 2015)
Mirage evokes a desert landscape but it is the cinematic image itself that is the mirage. Working with the material textures of Super-8 film, Mirage presents two visual planes: the captured image and the surface of the film strip itself. The relationship between these is as much one of conflict as mutual support. Excerpt
‘Superimposed Kinetics’ (Moving Image, 2 minutes (loop) 16mm, Ireland 2018)
Atoosa Pour Hosseini's exhilarating bird's eye perspective of the ocean employs richly saturated 16mm colours and dizzying camerawork in creating a shamanic vision that sweeps beyond the limitations of human perception.
"Antler" (15 Minutes, Super8mm, Ireland, 2018)
"Atoosa Pour Hosseini’s work with Super-8 conjures a mysterious territory that exists between memory, subjective perception and the objective materiality of the filmed image. Antler pushes deeper into this realm, seamlessly combining archival footage of animals and reptiles in their habitats with newly filmed material of the artist and an assistant at work in a botanical garden. Inspired by the famous Voynich Manuscript, a 15th century book written in an unknown language and featuring detailed drawings of plants that do not exist, Antler transforms a botanical garden greenhouse into a laboratory of perception and a film set. Nature sampled and presented for study in this setting is equated with natural phenomena framed and captured on film. But rather than taming or normalising nature, these study aids function as cues to oneiric immersion in a vivid but utterly elusive world. The sensuous, painterly quality of Pour Hosseini’s visual style results in a hauntingly introspective, out-of-time atmosphere that is heightened by Karen Power’s unsettling sound track." Excerpt
"Gleanings" (8 minutes, Standard 8mm, Ireland & Switzerland 2017)
Super-8 memories emerge and vanish into the imageless texture of scratched celluloid, an object at once very present and channelling long absent moments of ambiguity. A soldier allows a little girl to handle a gun, a machine like the camera that links a calm present with war and death. But who is watching this film? Whose footsteps are pacing? Who is invading and appropriating these memories? Excerpt
"Oasis" (7:30 minutes, Super8mm, Germany / Ireland 2015)
Figures emerge from and retreat back into the waters of the oasis, coming forward to greet the eye of the Super-8 camera. The scene initially appears idyllic. But the alien scrutiny of the artificial eye is sinister, at cold cross-purposes to the human warmth it brushes against. Excerpt
"Clandestine" (15 minutes, Super8mm, Estonia / Ireland 2015)
Layers both space and time, superimposing imagery and creating entrancing patterns of repetition and startling interruption. Voyaging from one land to another, from found footage to mysteriously evocative scenes shot by the artist to the pure abstraction of hand-scratched film, it traces a haunting inner logic of memory and discovery. Excerpt
"Last Phase" (1:56 Minutes, HD, Ireland 2014)
When engaging with Last Phase one is immersed in the experience of being submerged and emerging. Through a moving image that is at once appearing and disappearing, it revolves around this tension between two distinct conditions. Excerpt
"Incubus" (1:30 Minutes, DSLR, Switzerland & Ireland 2013) is a highly saturated nightmarish unsettling video work that explores unconsciousness nature of memory and its relationship with moving image and sound. Watch Here
"Luminosity 2" (2:25 Minutes, DSLR HDV Super8mm Video Projection, Ireland 2013) Watch Here
"Silences" (3 Minutes - DSLR - Iran & Ireland 2011) is a short moving image piece with a sense of eerie and fear. The saturated colour and fluid attribution of it can suggest a nightmare-like experience.
"Then" (5 Minutes - Scanned Hand Drawing, Digital Manipulation & Digital Post Production, Ireland 2011) examines the mysterious world that has been embedded in memory of time and space, a virtual universe which exits somewhere between reality and dream. Images in "Then" progresses and dissolves into another and creates a haunting audio / visual experience. Watch Here
"Dimensions" (6 Minutes, DSLR HDV Super8mm Video Projection Ireland 2013) is a moving image with sound, made of various techniques such as multi-layer projections, manufactured lighting, hand-altered mechanism and interposing objects. Watch Here
"Reflected" (2 Minutes & 17 Seconds - DSLR - Ireland 2011) is a haiku-like moving image piece that focuses on rhythmic and atmospheric nature of water to create dreamlike environments with an urban aesthetic. Watch Here
"Test (1)" 45 seconds hand drawn animation piece that portrays a homage to The Cabinet of DR. Caligari in four takes, Ireland 2010.