The immersive project to plunge yourself into Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti’s visual practice on an intellectual level.
Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti are Los Angeles based experimental artist duo. Ania Catherine defines herself as an artist and art director, whilst Dejha Ti is an immersive artist and technologist. Together they are an art explosion, vibrant art-partners, working with ground-breaking technologies, always striving for new contexts to explore their artistic manifesto.
Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti had purchased some mirrors they found in a discount store in Los Angeles and were keen to turn them into something beautiful. The next day they were flying to Dubai for a project they were working on with their collaborator, Samira Mahboub. One afternoon, the three ventured to the desert as the sun was going down, roaming around Dubai outskirts, looking for an interesting location to shoot. With only 30 minutes of sunlight left, and not the highest expectations, the three of them spotted a sandy dune. Ania and Samira, wearing matching black gowns, climbed to the top of the hill, while Dejha stayed at the bottom with the camera. It was windy and difficult to hear each other at that distance, so they just had to go with it.
In this one instance when Ania and Samira were in a uniform position, the wind blew the dresses in this perfectly surreal, yet symmetrical shape. It was a collaboration not just between the three artists, but with nature, as the wind’s choreography of the clothing plays a huge role in making the image so memorable. Created with very little planning, they love to remark that, at odds with what people think, there is no post-editing: everything in the image is what was shot in the camera. The photo was first published in RIKA Magazine in 2017. The name behind the project recalls the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan titled “mirror stage”, which they made plural, as all the images refracted by the mirrors become embedded into their bodies, as well as they are in the surrounding nature.
