This research began during the 2018/2019 HWP program and led to two distinct works: a five-channel video installation and a later video essay, each offering a different perspective on the politics of destruction and its representation.
The installation focuses on street barriers in Beirut, tracing their lineage to anti-terror barricades that became prevalent in Germany and Europe. It further connects these structures to the visual and material arsenal of crash-test technologies—particularly the high-speed cameras originally developed to analyze the destructive force of atomic detonations by measuring the fireball’s expansion. These cameras, equipped with electromagnetic rather than mechanical shutters, do not merely document destruction but are embedded in a representational regime preloaded with the intent to optimize it. The project argues that such technologies and infrastructures of securitization anticipate collapse in advance, scripting catastrophe as inevitable and rendering the present moment devoid of agency. Security measures, rather than remaining exceptional, come to define the norm—enveloping everyday life and foreclosing the possibility of alternative futures. The installation engages with a barricade found along the Beirut shoreline to interrogate how the logic of securitization rehearses collapse as destiny, naturalizing its recurrence and displacing any space for interruption or refusal.
The video essay, produced later, shifts focus to a crash test gone wrong—where the impact injures the driver—and extends this incident into a historical genealogy of the barricade, from its militarized function during World War II to its contemporary incarnations in civilian space. It closes with a sonic reflection on the zinat technique in tombak playing: a decorative gesture which, when excessively repeated, ceases to liberate rhythm and instead becomes structure itself. Here, zinat serves not as a counterpoint but as an acoustic analogue to the proliferation of barricades—a sonic rendering of how securitization logic, once proliferated, becomes totalizing. Anticipation overtakes the present, transforming the collapse it seeks to prevent into a self-fulfilling, omnipresent condition.
- Now Is No Time At All, December 2023
- Now Is No Time At All, July 2022
- Now Is No Time At All, July 2019
Now Is No Time At All, December 2023
Video, 9′ 47″
The video essay follows the lecture performance from July 2022, the voice over was recorded and edited with the support of micro-funding from the Filmbüro Bremen.
Now Is No Time At All, July 2022
Lecture Performance delivered as part of postgraduate program completion at HFK Bremen
This lecture performance has come together after revisiting materials from the work “Now is No Time At all” which was made three years before.
The lecture performance also picks up on the part of the work which was never shown in its final realization in 2019, yet it situates it new in the context of Germany and speaks out the essayistic part that was originally thought to be the voice-over and later on was reduced to subtitle hovering 5 channel video. Here you could watch an excerpt from this lecture.
Now Is No Time At All, July 2019
Group Exhibition as part of Home Workspace Program (HWP) Open Studios at Ashkal Alwan
5 screens, speakers, sound loop
Now Is No Time At All is a 5-channel video installation, with each component demonstrating a distinct realization of speed. Paulo Virilio suggests dromology as a question of rhythm, of the variety of rhythms, of chrono-diversity. This unpacks the relationship between the accelerated tempo and its prolonged realization. The beat which arises from the collision is a stimulus, and marks the durational pattern in a percussive sense. High-speed cameras conjure the eyes, but fail to manipulate the ears. A sudden boom becomes silent, or an instantaneous beat expands into something soothing. The periodic indicative element is missing, the crash repeats without damage, the explosion costs no wounds.
Rehearsing the catastrophe fetishizes the properties of the outcome, forgets the causality. It is a devastating attempt to capture the immediacy, to freeze it in order to gaze at it. It is flirting with the monument of the crash, privileges the micro- and milliseconds of destruction. The speed of the accident penetrates the perception of time. It squeezes the possibility of diverse rhythms, it converges all to one, the higher speed.
Now is the time which does not pass. The time in which the past is present more than ever. One cannot enact prevention without a determined future. Yet, one cannot account for the totality of contingencies. Now has no variety of rhythms, now is no time at all.
UNTOUCHABILITY TO UNSPEAKABILITY by Mohit Shelare
Aria Farajnezhad 