Video installation 2018
Anna Knappe & Amir Jan
HD video, 16 min; pigment prints on DIASEC, and carpets
Sham Marriage examines how love is staged, photographed, questioned, and made available for judgment. The work is based on the artists’ own wedding images and the surrounding process of posing, performing, and explaining a relationship across cultural, familial, and bureaucratic expectations.
The video combines behind-the-scenes footage from a wedding photo shoot with heavily edited images in which the artists perform recognizable gestures of romantic love. These images draw on a visual culture where marriage is made visible through symbolic poses, idealized settings, and carefully directed emotion. The work follows the distance between lived intimacy and the images through which that intimacy is expected to appear.
A voice-over repeats questions drawn from immigration procedures and family expectations, turning the relationship into something to be described, tested, and verified. Each repetition is interrupted by an eye that looks back at the viewer. Through this structure, Sham Marriage treats the wedding image as both a performance of love and a site of scrutiny.
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