Noam Toran’s work spans multiple disciplines and mediums, from film to installations, conceptual product design to photography. Heavily research based, Toran’s work appropriates the discourse of design as a means with which to investigate and envision anomalies in contemporary and speculative human behaviour. Toran not only creates objects but their narratives and contexts as well, imagining them to be the real protagonists of modern everyday life. Often foregrounding them in short films, these objects are imagined as constructions for particular individuals and psyches, vehicles for an elaboration of the desires, fantasies and pathologies unique to specific modern subjects.
For example, Desire Management is a film celebrating the use of products for dissident behaviour. In the film, domestic space is defined as the last private frontier, a place where alienated people use bespoke appliances to engage in unorthodox experiences. Based on real testimonials and news reports, the objects created attempt to reveal the inherent need for expression and identity formation in the face of conformity.
The film Objects for Lonely Men tells the story of a man so obsessed with Godard’s film A Bout de Souffle that he designs and builds a tray which reflects the physical language of the film. The tray is made from a single sheet of vacuum formed plastic and has recesses which house the objects that the man interacts with. The objects include a mannequin’s head that resembles Jean Seberg (the female lead), a gun, hat, telephone, Herald Tribune newspaper, sunglasses, ashtray, steering wheel, rear view mirror and a pack of Gitanes non-filtered cigarettes. The tray serves as an outlet for the man’s desires; it allows him to directly channel the influence of the movie on his fantasies into physical action.
The other film being presented, Postponing the Inevitable, was produced in collaboration with Onkar Kular.