Mississippi

Nature is not what differentiates between chaos and structure, the observer does through his or her choice of point of view and representational technique. In the tradition of avant-garde film subduing chaos through abstraction, translating it into structured form, has produced as many varieties as the dissolution of easily comprehensible forms and structures in chaos. While on one hand Mississippi belongs to this tradition, it maintains an ironic distance at the same time.
What in the beginning of Mississippi appears to be a lavishly choreographed dialog between natural chaos and abstract structure is revealed at some point as an autonomous concert of forms. At first one would assume that Arash T. Riahi’s intoxicating visual composition amounts to simply making chaotically spraying drops of water on the one hand and geometrically structured (and dominated by a bright red) fields of color on the other accessible in the contrapuntal rhythm of their movements. Gradually the point of view offered at the beginning starts to falter through subtle shifts in perspective and focus until the borders between chaos and structure, between abstraction and representation, begin to blur and the visual levels, apparently arranged artificially, meld into a uniform, concrete shape through interaction with the slowly beginning noise on the soundtrack.