Nazgol Ansarinia, Grey Chair (from the Mendings Series), 2012
In the Office exhibition To Express the Feelings of a Chair When We Sit on it borrows its title from a work of the 2010 Broomberg & Chanarin series, “The Prestige of Terror”, in which the work was based on a pamphlet written by the Egyptian surrealist George Henein in response to the Hiroshima atomic bombing.
“A chair”, in Henein’s own phrase, is the direct object of the verb “to sit”. Yet Henein’s proposition that the chair notices that it is being sat upon makes it into a kind of oblique and surreal subject. Henein’s phrase is also a command –“to express”, and as a result, its response to that command is exhibited in this selection of art works of Middle East and European artists that might anticipate the chair as a protagonist.