Presence Documents addresses the effects of instant digital image-making on the contemporary perception of life. With the rapid advancements of digital technologies of documentation, the gap between taking the image and viewing it has shortened to the point that we can now experience the documentation of life in close to real time. This phenomenon has further complicated our relationship with images produced by cameras, shifting their status from relics of the past to documents of presence, explains Sohrab Mohebbi, whose blog consists of daily entries, each focusing on a video or image posted online on the same day by citizen reporters and indigenous journalists. Mohebbi also relates these images of the present to performance art’s experiments with documentation.
Sohrab Mohebbi is a writer and curator currently based in Los Angeles. His curatorial projects include “Hassan Khan: The Hidden Location”(Queens Museum of Art, 2011), “Rope-a-Dope” (co-curated with Gabi Ngcobo) (Cabinet, 2010), “For All the Wrong Reasons”(Center for Curatorial Studies, 2010), and “Strike a Pose”(co-curated with Özge Ersoy) for Bidoun Projects 2010. Mohebbi is the recipient of a 2010 Montehermoso research grant for the project Visual Parrhesia. His writings have been published in Bidoun, where he is a contributing editor, as well asin Artforum, Art Agenda, e-flux journal, and Modern Painters, among others. Mohebbi was the 2010 curatorial fellow at Queens Museum of Art. He received an MA in curatorial studies from Bard College and a BFA in photography from Tehran University. He currently teaches at Otis College of Art and Design.