You Know Me More Than You Think!

This artwork belongs to the funded doctoral research project, titled: How Can We Teach/Learn Emotion Words and Complex Abstract Meanings? – A Relational A/r/tographic Conversation In-between Images and Words.

Nedasadat Sajadi

The University of Melbourne

Melbourne Graduate School of Education

 
 

This research, as a 50/50 creative thesis, was an a/r/tographic conversation between a written exegesis and an a/r/t exhibition held on April 1, 2022, at The Melbourne Graduate School of Education. This exhibition presented a series of artworks as research, including the 'You Know Me More Than You Think!' installation.

 
 

'You Know Me More Than You Think!' discussed a Persian miniature titled: 'Rustam rescues Bijan from the pit' from Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase — Smithsonian Unrestricted Trust Funds, Smithsonian Collections Acquisition Program, and Dr. Arthur M. Sackler, S1986.267.

This image (with permission) was projected on a wall within a dark room in the exhibition. Viewers could see the image as a whole and were able to interact with and observe their shadows affecting it. In another part of the exhibition, this Persian miniature was deconstructed into six sections and then printed on six transparent acetate sheets. These acetate sheets, then, were hung from the ceiling, creating layers which the viewers could walk in-between or see the image coming together as a whole when looking at these from a distance. The reason behind this was to show that separating an unfamiliar image to different layers could ease the process of reading by encountering and re-encountering the image from different perspectives and through different groups of visual elements.