The body is an instrument for coming into contact with the world and a means to perceive it. In this personal habitat, a person sends and receives messages and generates meaning with others (organs of the human body and the people that are being addressed) in the context of social and natural life. On the other hand, however, a disruption in the conveyance of the message and the illegibility of mental arenas, create an unusual context to maintain the connection; similar to a bubble that a living being makes to keep its distance to other creatures, a person creates social distance to etiolate his connection. Therefore, he or she will no longer be able to see, hear, touch, or smell others, nor is he able to create meaning. The distance is not necessarily measurable for it can be psychological.
Unlike his earlier performances, Amir Mobed’s narrative style is not replete with pain and suffering, violence, blood, and other emotionally charged behaviors in this performance/installation. In the performance part, which is his longest to date, Mobed weaves a narrative in which he will get caught later on; this narrative, he believes, is a naked representation of reality. However, the patience and perseverance in the performance of “Disformission” results from long hours of focusing on actions and controlling emotions: it is not the result of a shift in processes that the artist had earlier adopted in the nakedness of his concepts and performances. It is like the calm before the storm. The beginning and the end of this process-based performance do not really matter: it is about Mobed’s narration and the audience viewing it in passivity, like we are used to do for years now.
If Amir Mobed had depicted this suffering in a straightforward fashion in his earlier works, he is now presenting the process of pain in a symbolic manner. If he painted a personal portrait of the state of suffering, now he is sketching out a collective misery: weaving a tangled web all around himself.
