RockBlog

I really identify my self with Jila in many ways one of them is leaving what you know for so many years and then growing up in a totally different culture. One thing that really impressed my was that after all the years apart from her roots in a way using her photography and now film she shows us the importance that people and country have for her. Is also interesting the way she used iconography like the burning book. Unfortunately after talking about her religion, when I saw the book the 1st thought that came to my mind was the Quran. I really enjoy her work and the movies.

I found Jila Nikpay’s presentation of photographs and films to be very interesting. Being an Iranian living in the upper Midwest of the United States presents a very curious combination of cultural experiences. She named three themes which characterize her work being identity, longing and memory which I feel were very well portrayed through her imagery. I thought the works that explore how women’s bodies and behaviors are manipulated/controlled by the male sex in current Islamic culture to be particularly interesting. This is due to the fact that as a woman living in an environment that permission is not required to do most things, I enjoyed a visual representation of what that must be like. I felt like, as Jim mentioned in the discussion afterward, that her ideas are conveyed very archetypically and therefore I feel as though the messages could have been presented in a less obvious way. But that is purely a personal aesthetic and choice. I did, however, appreciate the fact that she is an artist who is concerned/interested in what her viewers think and how they react to seeing her work and was so willing to listen to comments made. Overall a good presentation.

Jila Nikpay's work was really interesting because the use of photography and music used in her videos. She talked about her journey to and from Iran dealing with the changes she faced because of the revolution there and the change in clothing for women and how a woman was suppose to act around men. I wish she would have talked more about the time frame of when she went back to Iran more. I really like the transitions in the first film that she showed because the girl was on a journey walking through the woods, meeting an old lady, burning a book, taking off her headdress and dancing. The cinematography reminded me of our visual narratives and got me thinking about something that I could do that is similar to what Nikpay does.