• Natascha Sadr Haghighian, I can't work like this, 2007/08, wall, nails, 2 hammers.
  Courtesy the artist and Johann König, Berlin. Installation view at the 16th Biennale of Sydney 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
  Photograph: Ben Symons
  

Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s works take many different forms, including video, film, websites, photography, research, sound and events. In I can’t work like this (2007), Sadr Haghighian invokes the response of an imagined worker to an impossible task. A single sentence is constructed from nails hammered into a gallery wall. The nails are bent, protruding, and some lie discarded on the ground alongside two hammers, as if the workers have just exited. The space between the nails spells out the distressed statement ‘I can’t work like this’ in a seemingly purposeless gesture yet anarchistic fantasy. Tower (2008) is a site-specific sound installation created for the location of a former searchlight tower on Cockatoo Island that was painted over by activists in the colours of the Aboriginal flag over a decade ago. At the tower, a leftover from the island’s military past, the sounds of cracking and crunching wood are heard, as in the moment just before a tree is felled.

Share this Artist:

• Digg it!
• del.icio.us
• Newsvine
• Stumble Upon