About

Sepehr Talebi is an artist working with moving image and sound, based in Berlin.

His work is concerned less with what happens inside the frame than with everything standing around it: projectors, speakers, monitors, cables, editing timelines, the room a film is watched in. This is a region that lies outside the image without belonging to ordinary life — a margin, an in-between, where making and what it leaves behind can be looked at directly. His first training was in mechanical engineering, a field where attention falls on production and its leftovers rather than on the finished thing.

He works with film material that already exists, most often fragments of films he has watched and re-watched. These fragments are rarely presented intact. They are re-filmed, projected and filmed again, shifted in colour, cut apart, separated from their sound. What is left of a film is no longer the film, and not yet anything else, and it is that condition his works hold open: an image as it is remembered rather than as it looked, a sound detached from its picture, a projection running in an empty room.

Across single-channel video and sound installation, his work asks how a film goes on existing once it is over — how its images are remembered, and how it shapes the body and its gestures long after the film itself is forgotten.