Catalogue > At random

Azar Saiyar

Monument of Distance

Vidéo | hdv | couleur | 6:57 | Finlande | 2018

Googoosh, a popular and loved Iranian-Azerbaijani singer, performs a version of the song Ayrılıq – Separation. The performance is from a 1970s television show and it has been copied several times from one videotape to another. Ayrılıq could be a love song but it is told that composer Ali Salimi (who as a young man had to leave Soviet Azerbaijan, move to Iran and leave many of his loved ones behind) wanted to make music about his sense of longing.

Azar Saiyar is Helsinki-based filmmaker and visual artist whose art has been shown at film and media art festivals, galleries, exhibitions, museums and from television. Currently she is working with a short film project called The Story of a Badly Behaving Child and Monument of Distance – a found footage piece on immigration and memory. She often uses archive materials and plays with images and words of collective memory to look towards the ways of looking, speaking, remembering, growing, conforming and telling stories. She also does collaborative works with other artists.