Booth: A16, FOCUS
This is the story of a book that is not a book. The conquering folds of a new work imagined by the Iranian artist trio have transformed the New York Times-published Obama: The Historic Journey (2009) into a tale of our times. An onslaught of tropes sprung from globalized corporate visual culture, collaged onto the individually traced pages of the original book, cast a silhouetted Obama as the ultimate business manager. Strategies of concealing and revealing unfold across these pages, as the original images peer out from behind the masking of collaged imagery. The 27 drawings are excerpted moments from the wider sequence, freeze-framed and contemplated-a glimpse of the curtain being lifted on a largely unfathomable collaborative creation that ultimately seems to be the product of a sole hand.