The central focus of ‘Sleepwalker’ is a single character, a young man who is seen in certain mundane urban spaces, apparently adrift, wandering aimlessly and alone. However this aimlessness quickly gives way to a realisation that there is an undercurrent of another kind of psychological space being experienced. He begins to investigate his surroundings, touching things, testing their surfaces as if not being certain of their material stability, as if they contain some element of threat directed at him, as he does so he triggers another kind of reality which might be seen as flashbacks, recollections of previous experiences or some form of neurosis. These threatening images filmed through a blue filter suggest a liminal space of paranoia, of anxiety, or perhaps of fantasy; there is a gradual but insistent fracturing and blurring of the notion of reality and the space of psychosis  as if the rules of the game that determine our understanding of the way things are,  are being broken.

Nooshin Farhid was born in Tehran, Iran and lives in London. Her videos appropriate different narrative situations and filmic genres, re-presenting them in new and disturbing scenarios. Her starting point is often the ordinary, the commonplace or the culturally familiar. She acutely observes these mundane events extracting and editing them in such a way that there is an interplay between lucidity and reason, obsession and madness.

Structurally these videos often appear fragmented and disjointed. The recognition of one filmic genre is disrupted by another in such a way as to continually avoid the security of familiar narrative territory, and as such does not allow the viewer full control over what they are experiencing. However throughout this ‘schizophrenic’ journey there is a certain logic of sense that threads its way through the complexity of the work.