At Once Here and There is an installation of two looped video projections paired with a set of three lightbox prints. The project is staged to mimic the experience of walking in a real place and to encourage absorptive encounters with objects. By creating and staging this hybrid scenario, where the work hovers between media (photography and video, sculpture and photography), the project attempts to create the experience of being in two places at once.

The exhibition explores the notion of “orientation” as discussed in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and my own experience as a transnational migrant. The project explores the disorientation that comes with feeling as if one is living in two places at once. In an attempt to define this state, I turned a familiar and seemingly banal place in the real world into a strange experience. Playing with visual perception and the experience of looking, I used light and form to render the banal as uncanny which also creates feelings of queerness and displacement.

Consisting of two looped video projections, paired with a set of three lightbox prints. The projected videos depict found sculptural objects that are slowly revealed in fragments through the play of light. Each video piece is generated from a series of still photographs that dissolve into one another, playing with your perception.

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Bahar Kamali is a lens-based artist whose conceptual work stems from an interest in subjects that are related to philosophy, cultural studies, and the medium of photography. She holds a BA in Visual Studies from University of Toronto and is currently completing a BFA in photography at Ryerson University.