Haleh Niazmand's Studio:

Survey of Common Sense

1996-2000

 

Survey of Common Sense is a recreation of an earlier participatory painting installation project of the same title by Haleh Niazmand (USA). A parody of the polling industry that for the past 5 or 6 decades has been the engine of "democracy" in the United States, Niazmand's image-text intervention, in the form of survey questions with forced yes/no "choices" is not only an authorial comment on the practices of polling as determinant of "democratic outcome," but a strong challenge to notions of "pragmatism" and "common sense" preached from political pulpits in the present-day United States. Beyond this, Survey of Common Sense is an invitation, courtesy of an artist from the "Middle East" and a citizen of the "West," to the participant/viewers to recognize, acknowledge and reflect upon the ways in which each and every one of us is intricately and deeply implicated, really and virtually, in the bloody absurdity of political moment. As such, and with the very impossibility of responding with any degree of ease and resolution to Niazmand's questions, this work is an incessant challenge, so we will not slip into forgetting.

 

Curatorial Statement for Real Play by Gita Hashemi