Muraqqa - Venice Biennale'19 / AP

"Muraqqa" Audio-Visual Painting Premiered in Venice Contemporary Art Biennale 2019 #AP edition

A Muraqqa is an album containing paintings of different miniature styles from different periods in Azerbaijan’s history. The images present a conventional realism and static structure, but the narrative hides inner dynamics. Frozen moments contain rich variations of potential actions.

The artist has reproduced original miniature paintings and represented them as a linear digital story. The authentic traditional Muraqqa becomes a source for the construction of an alternative virtual replica. The artist has added his stories to the original content and created a video installation. He sets the characters of the Muraqqa in motion to play with plot development, and animated effects demonstrate its artificiality.

Viewers witness fictional storytelling that goes far beyond its original context. The miniature paintings’ stories are arguably fake from the outset because they are a product of the artists’ imaginations. The animation represents both fairytales and reliable facts. Following the pictures’ inner dynamics, the artist creates his vision of the represented events. This storytelling reveals the nature of interpretation. This process reveals how the manipulation of content happens.

The artist refers to Azerbaijan’s Biennale Arte 2019 agenda concerning the dissemination of fake news. People have unlimited possibilities when interpreting a singular image or a fact. Therefore, the artist motivates viewers to create new narratives and suggests other ways of connecting and contextualizing images.