Matilda Aslizadeh

Video installation welds economy and culture in its critique of neoliberalism.

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A woman sings to an audience of none. Her stage is the lip of a quarry that curves out below her. Made two years ago, and showing from June 15 to Nov. 1 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Moly and Kassandra foreshadows this time of COVID-19 with its empty theatres. 

Each of the trio of videos in Vancouver-based Matilda Aslizadeh’s installation stitches together a solo singer with a vast terraced mine as her amphitheatre. Molybdenum, or moly, is a mineral commonly used as a steel-strengthening additive in the manufacture of such things as missile and aircraft parts. 

The deeply scarred earth of these mines, for Aslizadeh, illustrates neoliberal capitalism, a free-market economy without government price controls to counter market volatility.

The installation’s three screens are wooden structures whose top edges are cut in silhouette graphs that chart, from left to right, the inflation rate of the U.S. dollar, the stock market value of molybdenum and its annual extraction amount. 

This data was translated into modernist classical vocal arrangements by Vancouver-based composer Graham Meisner. Vancouver soprano Camille Hesketh, playing the Greek mythological character Kassandra in each video, twists and turns as she vocalizes the fluctuations. The resulting arias feel disjointed, almost like vocal warm ups. The connection to the graph, which is difficult to see in the dim lighting, is not immediately apparent. 

Hesketh’s broad-shouldered outfits and cylindrical caps invoke vintage flight attendant uniforms; the clothing predicts the defining look for women in the 1980s. At a time when women were surging into the workforce, wide shoulders became a fashion motif, a posturing strategy. 

In the central video, which represents the wildest fluctuations, Hesketh wears the most glamorous costume, a long vermilion gown with frills at neck and wrists, enhancing the display of self-possession as Kassandra, who, after spurning the advances of Apollo, was cursed to foretell the future truthfully but never to be believed. She warbles the climbs and dips of a capitalist system, which, like a house of cards, is ever on the verge of collapse, the syllabic abstraction reflecting the arbitrariness of value. 

The year 1979, from which Aslizadeh takes her fashion cue, inspired by Yves Saint Laurent, was also the year a molybdenum mine opened in Kitsault, B.C., only to close a few years later due to crashing prices for the mineral and the era's oil crisis, catalyzed by the Iranian revolution. Diminished oil production in Iran led to increased oil prices. The American government attempted price regulation, but oil companies hoarded stock to sell later at a higher rate. Amidst lengthy queues for gas, government price controls were removed and neoliberalism took hold. 

The mines, ersatz theatres for Greek tragedy, in which Kassandra was a recurring character, and whose prophecies, had they been heeded, might have changed history, are more than mere stages. Aslizadeh packs much into this installation, asking us to look back to a specific point in history as a framework for contemplating our current political and environmental situation. ■ 

Matilda Aslizadeh: Moly and Kassandra is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery from June 15 to November 1, 2020.

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