Sunsets, Everyday
by Basir Mahmood, Italy 2020, 14'
SUBJECT, SHOOTING AND EDITING: Basir Mahmood   PRODUCER: In Between Art Film
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Leonardo Bigazzi   LANGUAGE: vo: sound

Schermo dell'Arte - Archivio Film   Presented at Lo schermo dell’arte 2020 
 
As part of the project 
Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence
First project by the Fondazione In Between Art Film, that includes 8 artists’ shorts on the subject of domestic violence, how it has increased due to the pandemic and the resulting social containment measures.

Basir Mahmood commissioned a production team in Pakistan to create and film, in his absence, a repeated scene of domestic violence, based on his instructions and some reference images. While the main crew was busy with this task, two camera operators were asked to constantly film the entire process and the elements of the set, down to the last detail. The process of staging violence is what generates the images on the screen, but the act itself is almost completely hidden from the
viewer. Rejecting spectacularization, the artist focuses instead on the cinematic process and the codes of its language. The characters are the technicians and crew members struggling with his exhausting demand that they repeat the scene for sixteen straight hours of shooting. The almost obsessive repetition of identical actions, like washing the floor, becomes a way of expressing the routine nature of violence.

Basir Mahmood (Pakistan 1985, lives and works between Amsterdam and Lahore). Among his recent exhibitions: Innsbruck International Biennial (2020); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2018); 10th Berlin Biennial of Contemporary Art (2018); Etrillard Foundation, Paris (2017); Contour Biennale 8, Mechelen (2017). In the context of Lo schermo dell’arte he participated in the VI edition of VISIO European Program of Artists’ Moving Images in 2017, and in the exhibition Directing the Real: Artists’ Films and Video in the 2010s.

Selected Flmograpy: 
Moon-Sighting, 2019; Good Ended Happily, 2018; All Voices Are Mine, 2018; Observing Translators Work, 2018; In Author’s Space of No Physical Actions, 2018.

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