For her third solo-show at the gallery, in camera showcases Sissi Farassat’s latest series, Revelation. In this series, the Iranian-Austrian artist releases fragments of selected images. Within the exhibition, these partially concealed prints form a whole in which the image is revealed through omissions. At the heart of Sissi Farassat’s work lies the essential gesture of choosing what she reveals and what she withholds.

« For those who know Sissi Farassat’s work, Revelation is above all a surprise. A pioneer of interventions on her photographic prints with bead embroidery and many other ways of augmenting the image through manual treatment of its surface, Sissi Farassat here offers an inverse method. The starting image is found and then covered. We only see it in fragments, we have to guess it. The desired object is only given by concealment. It’s about the body, the face and seduction. What we perceive is reminiscent of a time when the attributes of beauty were defined by the codes of cinema and magazines; we still find the somewhat outdated elegance of Hollywood women and staged kisses.

But, truth be told, Revelation is also perfectly faithful to Sissi Farassat’s approach. By using vernacular photographs on which she embroiders or weaves (Stitch, Pin Up, Contactsheet…), she continues a contemporary practice of upcycling photographs. Here, the particularity comes mainly from the fact that the covering of the image is carried out by the act of cropping or, more precisely, by a game of hide and seek : The image is shown via a strategy of blindness. What we don’t see takes center stage. What is above all consecrated here is the off-camera as a space that is both real and imaginary. In this game, the artist reveals subsets of the image, that is to say, as in mathematics, sets included in a set, a structure that is both divided and organically associated. (…) Through this gesture, Sissi Farassat achieves a poetry that associates materiality and disappearance. Revelation is also a device by fragmentation of the gaze, the visual mechanics of desire. »

Excerpt from La Nudité des images, Michel Poivert.