Ebrahim Noroozi

One of seven photographs from the series The Lake on its Last Legs, 2016, Digital print on Epson Hotpress Natural cotton rag, 80 x 120 cm, The National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of Asian Art Collection Purchase — Jahangir and Eleanor Amuzegar Endowment for Contemporary Iranian Art, S2022.6.1.1, ©️ Ebrahim Noroozi, courtesy of Silk Road Gallery and the artist

The World Unmade

Commentary by Eric C. Smith

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Revelation has a knack for telling the story of social disintegration as a tale of the destruction of the natural world, and vice versa. Revelation imagines the unravelling of both of these worlds as intertwined; economies and politics and class distinctions dissolve alongside the sky, the earth, and the water, with the world ‘rolling itself up’, as the text says in 6:14, ‘like a scroll’.

Ebrahim Noroozi series The Lake on its Last Legs documents the decline and disappearance of Lake Urmia in his native Iran. Once a large saltwater body, the lake has diminished through cycles of shrinkage and expansion due to drought, water diversion for agriculture, and damming. Noroozi shot this series at one of the lake’s recent nadirs, in 2016, when the surface area of the lake was about a tenth of its natural extent, and the water was never too deep to walk across.

In his Urmia compositions, Noroozi is always careful to include the human and the natural alongside each other, showing both the human appreciation for the lake and the human causes and consequences of its demise. In this photograph, a fishing boat sits abandoned and corroding on the dry lakebed, encrusted with salt and melting slowly back into the earth.

The opening of the sixth seal in Revelation 6:12–17 unleashes the unmaking of human and natural worlds. An earthquake, a blackened sun, a blood moon, and falling stars upend long-held certainties, and cause everyone—kings and generals, enslaved and free alike—to flee and hide. In the Anthropocene, it is anthropogenic and not divinely sent destruction that threatens the world, and the effects are not always experienced equally by ‘the rich and the powerful and everyone’, as 6:15 puts it. Some of the ‘everyone’, everyday people and especially people on the underside of power structures, are more susceptible than ‘the rich and the powerful’ who have amassed the resources to endure. But as is the case in both Revelation 6 and this series of photographs by Noroozi, the story of climate apocalypse will always be an intertwined story about both the natural world and the human beings who rely on it and help to bring about its destruction.

 

References

Noroozi, Ebrahim as told to Kieran Morris. 2019. ‘On Its Last Legs: Otherworldly Photos of a Dying Lake in Iran, March 13, 2019’, www.vice.com [accessed 4 April 2024]

See full exhibition for Revelation 6

Revelation 6

Revised Standard Version

6Now I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures say, as with a voice of thunder, “Come!” 2And I saw, and behold, a white horse, and its rider had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer.

3 When he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4And out came another horse, bright red; its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that men should slay one another; and he was given a great sword.

5 When he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” And I saw, and behold, a black horse, and its rider had a balance in his hand; 6and I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not harm oil and wine!”

7 When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” 8And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him; and they were given power over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.

9 When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne; 10they cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before thou wilt judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell upon the earth?” 11Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.

12 When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, 13and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale; 14the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. 15Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the generals and the rich and the strong, and every one, slave and free, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, 16calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; 17for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand before it?”

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