Biopsy of a close memory
Duration: 2’:45”
Year: 2012
This is a video installation / video art
Beyond the grossly ironic understatement of the title (the “operation” Keramati could hardly be more removed from a clinical biopsy, where living tissue is removed from a body to examine it for disease), the video constructs a narrative of bloody, horrific violence, the object of which is the (literal) defacement of a young woman, presumably the artist herself, depicted bust length in the images. The explosion of red across the face and upper body of the subject dressed and scarved in pure white suggests violation of the basest sort; its resonances for a western viewer are unmistakably sexual (as for example, in the violation of virgin purity) while its literal effect appears at the very least to be of humiliating debasement of the body and a stark transformation from subject into object. […] Keramati herself has connected the piece to the memory of all the massacre and wars to which she has been exposed by media virtually throughout her life. […]. (Glenn Harcourt/ The Artist, The Censor and the Nude/ Doppelhouse Press/ Los Angeles/ 2017/ page130 )
