Room 103

Encountering Sissi Farassat’s work, one quickly realizes the incredible amount of time she has spent transforming her photographs with needle Next and thread, and slowly, deliberately, turning each into a unique object. Upending what seems to be most specific about the photographic medium—the instantaneousness of the picture-taking process, its completion by the photographic print, and the endless reproducibility of that print—Farassat alters her original photographs by stitching thousands of crystals, beads, and sequins directly onto the prints. She redefines figure-ground relationships, privileging the subject as it is seemingly surrounded by a shimmering sea of gemstones with the circle as a reoccurring motif, all of which reference Byzantine and Persian iconography as much as Vienna Secession and Pop Art. Farassat began by altering her own expired passports, embellishing them with sequins and beadwork, again repurposing the passport from its original use to a unique artwork. Since then, Farassat has used either self-portraits or Photographie of her friends and close acquaintances. The images are neither staged nor formally posed, but always seductive and mysterious. Farassat isolates each photograph’s subject with her handiwork, replacing the original background with a delicate overlay. By doing so, she blurs the distinction between the photograph and the object, the revealed and the concealed, and eliminates the subject from its original context. Farassat challenges our gaze and seems to take pleasure in the ambivalence of her transformations.