Barzakh (2025) Zara Manzoor
Barzakh (2025)
Single channel video installation, (16mm transferred to digital, iPhone footage and digital
camcorder) colour, sound. 12m.
Barzakh (2025) moves through a city suspended between presence and absence, memory and forgetting, desire and dread. An Arabic word meaning "separation" or "barrier," barzakh refers to a state between life and death – a veil between the dead and their return to the world of the living. The film explores the haunted contours of longing and dislocation: spaces flicker, thresholds multiply, and bodies move like apparitions through a city that never fully reveals itself. What emerges is neither dream nor document, but a realm where perception falters and something unnamed lingers.
My artistic practice is rooted in an exploration of identity and displacement, desire and loss. Working across moving image, sound, and photography, I trace the emotional and psychological tensions that emerge in transitory forms of existence – whether cultural, social, or metaphysical – and how these conditions can be expressed through a merging of the real and the imagined.
My interests lie in weaving narratives that reflect the complexities of living between multiple worlds. Shaped as much by absence as by presence, my work draws on myth and the uncanny to explore how estrangement and duality are embedded within diasporic and hybrid identities. By blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary, my practice engages with both personal and collective histories, emphasising the liminal spaces where identity is continually fractured, undone, and remade.
zaramnzr.com
@zara.mnzr
Single channel video installation, (16mm transferred to digital, iPhone footage and digital
camcorder) colour, sound. 12m.
Barzakh (2025) moves through a city suspended between presence and absence, memory and forgetting, desire and dread. An Arabic word meaning "separation" or "barrier," barzakh refers to a state between life and death – a veil between the dead and their return to the world of the living. The film explores the haunted contours of longing and dislocation: spaces flicker, thresholds multiply, and bodies move like apparitions through a city that never fully reveals itself. What emerges is neither dream nor document, but a realm where perception falters and something unnamed lingers.
My artistic practice is rooted in an exploration of identity and displacement, desire and loss. Working across moving image, sound, and photography, I trace the emotional and psychological tensions that emerge in transitory forms of existence – whether cultural, social, or metaphysical – and how these conditions can be expressed through a merging of the real and the imagined.
My interests lie in weaving narratives that reflect the complexities of living between multiple worlds. Shaped as much by absence as by presence, my work draws on myth and the uncanny to explore how estrangement and duality are embedded within diasporic and hybrid identities. By blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary, my practice engages with both personal and collective histories, emphasising the liminal spaces where identity is continually fractured, undone, and remade.
zaramnzr.com
@zara.mnzr
Barzakh (2025) Zara Manzoor
Barzakh (2025) Zara Manzoor
Barzakh (2025) Zara Manzoor
Related exhibitions & events:
Exhibtion: Within Here Elsewhere 20-23 March 2025
Postgraduate Degree Shows: Goldsmiths, University of London, 17-22 July 2025
Exhibtion: Within Here Elsewhere 20-23 March 2025
Postgraduate Degree Shows: Goldsmiths, University of London, 17-22 July 2025