SOBOOF · PRINTING LAB · PERFORMANCE

Printing
Lab. A press that travels.

The third strand of the studio, worked in ink and cut lino rather than mirror. A press, a table and a stack of paper, set up wherever the lab is hosted. The current project is Death Culture: six carved stamps — cypress, hound, bird of prey, mountain, flame, cloud — printed live, over and over, while visitors help place the body bags on the paper.

The work is about the banality of chanting death for the other, and about the fog of propaganda that makes it sayable. It draws its images from Iran, where footage of the protests showed the dead lying in the street in black body bags. The quantity matters here. So does who does the printing.

See the prints → Read the statement

DC::INDEX · ONGOING

25prints
documented

Death Culture09

Sky Bodybags16

Posters on site30–40

TechniqueLINO

StatusLIVE

PERFORMANCE · KIOSK SBF · DC

01 · Artist statement

The high-contrast other

In the artist's own words. The work sets out the story rather than taking a side.

High-contrast other: A classification of people in polarised societies, and especially under totalitarian regimes, which survive by alienating a minority.
Body bags of cedars: After footage from Iran showing protesters lying in the street in black body bags. The cedar, the mourning tree of Persian gardens and gravestones, carries that shape.

Death culture is the absolute absence of tolerance: the banality of chanting death for the “high-contrast other,” and justifying it in the name of any ideology.

Beyond the fog of propaganda lie body bags of cedars, mountains filled with missiles, and birds carrying instruments of war; everything here smells like death.

If we impose war, war will be imposed on us; if we implant death, we will harvest death.

Death culture is a hand-printing kiosk, an ongoing workshop-performance throughout the events. I will produce 30 to 40 posters on site featuring the Death Culture stamp collection, and ask visitors to help me place the body bags on the paper.

This performance showcases death, and the justification of it, in the high-contrast societies surrounded by the fog of propaganda, specifically in Iran. The quantity of work and the visitors' interaction matter here, because of the high number of people who lost their lives during all the protests and wars.

So be it, until we conclude that the high-contrast other has the right to live.

Soby Farahat · Soboof · Leeuwarden

02 · The kiosk

Printed in public

Not a finished edition brought to a wall. A press, a table, a stack of paper, and whoever walks up.

Format Workshop-performance

Output on site 30–40 posters

Technique Relief print · hand-cut lino

Participation Visitors place the body bags

Where Festivals, galleries, art markets

Every poster is pulled by hand from the same small set of blocks, so no two sheets carry the same arrangement or the same weight of ink. Some come out crowded and almost black. Others are nearly empty. The repetition is the method. The count is the point, because it has to answer to the number of people who lost their lives in the protests and the wars.

Visitors are not spectators. They are handed the body bag stamps and asked where they go. Choosing the place, and pressing down, is the part of the work the artist cannot do alone.