Omar Mismar
| Omar Mismar |
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| The Man Who Waited for a KissThe installation is comprised of the newspapers stacked on a wooden palette and lit by a cinema light. The newspapers are takeaways for audience members.The man stands under the surveillance cameras spread around San Francisco. He announces on Craigslist, as well as Grindr™ and Scruff™, the two most famous geo-locational mobile apps for gay men to meet and hook up, that he is waiting for a kiss. He waits for 30 minutes and leaves the site. The wait is mapped by a pinhole camera; its exposure relative to the time spent.A detective that the man meets on one of the apps is invited to look at the photos and curate them as he sees a narrative unfolding.The traces of the wait—the photographs of the pinhole—are compiled into and printed as a newspaper, laying out everything that happened, or did not happen. |
| Constructing Systems This project embraces my preoccupation with desire, intimacy, voyeurism, mapping, waiting, and the construction of the everyday… The latter is paramount for me in setting up systematic structures and constraints that create my everyday– I relay what to do/where to go to that structure— and that also trigger inspiration and become productive for making work. The current project clings on the surveillance camera system in San Francisco as the skeleton where possible romance is encountered. The pinhole camera is another system set in conversation with the previous one, interacting with it and producing its own dynamics with my body in between. A detective that I met on one of the apps gets involved in the process, arranging the photos as he sees a narrative unfolding. The final iteration of the work is a newspaper, the precursor of Craigslist, Grindr, and Scruff, that becomes a system of dissemination, holding within its pages the established web of connections and outing it to the public. |
