Dastan is pleased to announce the opening of Alma Sinai's solo exhibition titled "Where My Past Expires in a Deed" at Dastan's Basement. The exhibition will be open for public viewing from December 30, 2016, through January 10, 2017. This is Alma Sinai's first exhibition at Dastan. Her work has been previously featured in several group exhibitions in Iran, USA, Australia, Italy, India and the UAE.

Alma Sinai (b. 1989, Tehran, Iran) started work on "Where My Past Expires in a Deed" in 2015 with one of the videos displayed in this exhibition, "Where My Past Expires in a Deed" (2'22'', color and sound). Using TV test patterns as hangers, the video explores the realm of human memory and remembrance. "The sense of suddenness and abruption of the color bars is triggered by a personal experience in my childhood, where an unanticipated appearance of the color bars that happened because my mother had partially recorded two videos on top of each other", the artist writes.

"As a result" she continues, "…the first would end with an unexpected interruption and inaccessibility but not a conclusion in its own narrative, thus the cartoon or video suffered an unexpected, forced end that was caused by the appearance of the color bars and then continued with a new story, something absolutely irrelevant and different, a new cartoon or film. Consequently, the color bars and the beep noise stand as a void-holder in wake of an abruption and perpetually emblematize loss and absence."

This series consists of a series of manual prints (dry-points, mono-prints, and photo-transfers) that show sketched portraits, and two videos. The portraits are part of the artist's remembrance of memories past. On how these pieces work to complement each other, Alma Sinai writes "Static position of memories as a recollection is embodied in the still format and inert motifs of the print works. In contrast, the video typically portrays transformation of memories through the repetition of the animated and sound motifs offered by the video format. Therefore, the co-depending animation and stillness of these two media in the works of the show is to be perceived in virtue of a passage from the narrative fragments to the practice of narration which, by definition, expires in the past tense."