Self-Image or Stock Image? Roxy Farhat’s Found Subjects in the Society of the Spectacle

Can post-avant-garde methods of montage and found objects in the digital age reflect sexual and racial bias? If so, how might the co-opting of the aesthetics of a commodity also imply the liberation of a sexual subject? With these questions in mind, this essay analyzes art works and modes of production employed by Swedish-Iranian visual artist Roxy Farhat (b. 1984). With a particular focus on Farhat’s use of stock footage as found material in performance and film, the following explores a crisis of representation as it plays out in conceptual, marketized art in 2020s Sweden. Farhat’s activity is discussed in relation to the media wars and the related aesthetics of contemporary northern European welfare states, which receives great attention in many of Farhat’s works. By extending the discussion to the social montage immanent to trans experience, Farhat’s methods are also questioned for reproducing preconceptions about “authentic” forms of sexuality. My focus aligns with cultural theorist Sianne Ngai’s theoretical model called “theory of the gimmick,” while also stressing questions regarding social autonomy within commercial and virtual aspects of the cultural industry in times of multiple crises of the last decades. Approaching Farhat’s works in the context of an increasingly policed society in which they appear, the analysis highlights the ways in which these works refuse to uphold the crisis of representation of which they are part.