In The Box: Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday

Pouran Esrafily
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday, 2011
77 mins., video

It could be said that the video Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday explores the monotony of human existence. The action transpires over the course of a five-day work week where each day filmmaker Pouran Esrafily, dressed in a white silk slip, performs the same ritual. She takes her seat at a plain wooden table and eats plain, white noodles from a plain white bowl, chewing and staring into space. Nothing interrupts her in this mostly wordless, 77-minute self-portrait until she rises from her chair to paint a wide, black swath across the wall, as if crossing off days on a calendar.

But to view the work as simply the enactment of rote habit (or worse, tedium) would be a mistake. Despite its formal emphasis on routine, Esrafily’s performance-diary hybrid accentuates the beautiful nuances of routine. For some, the hustle and bustle of the work week can be energizing, but for Esrafily it threatens the peace and rhythm of her own orbit.

Esrafily filmed Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday in her domestic space. The setting includes a slim, vertical window that evokes a juncture between her inside world and the world outside. Through simple and banal acts, she expresses an effort to untangle and relax life’s unruliness. This tension is emphasized through oppositional pairings, like the knotted, white mound of noodles she feeds herself daily and the bold, black lines she paints, which suggest beginning and end points. Each day, Esrafily finds the resolution within herself to get from one point to the other.

The emotional distances vary, and while we cannot know why she sobs, laughs, or lingers over her food any more than we can know what motivates her painting of the lines, she finally reveals that “balance and beauty” are necessary in confronting life’s messiness.

As sole producer, director, editor, and performer for most of her projects, Esrafily cultivates emotional vulnerability in the diaristic spaces she creates. In Earth and Sky (2017), she is a mystic wanderer on a journey through dense forests and rocky cliffsides, responding to these landscapes with raw feeling. Alone Together (2013) offers another pattern of tense oppositions. While free-spirited teenagers socialize near a shoreline, Esrafily features herself alone in a beach house, staring across the vast ocean or gesturally painting on a canvas, projecting some emotional experience at this space as well. In The Sun Will Rise (2011), a bilingual portrait of her Iranian childhood, she writes at a desk for long, uninterrupted periods. At the end of the piece, she recites the words that also comfort her in Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday: “balance and beauty.”

Through duration, nuance, and repetition, Esrafily’s practice confronts her experience of time—how she spends it, how it passes, where it goes, how society organizes it—and articulates this through video, a medium inherently concerned with time. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday is composed of protracted scenes that Esrafily choreographs with detail and intimacy, calibrating our pace to her natural tempo. She creates a sincere portrait of herself, her home, and her emotions, entrusting us with a level of access that most share with only an intimate few. This candor can be jarring, comforting, even embarrassing. Perhaps Esrafily’s emphasis on time is less a theme than it is a medium, however, and perhaps the medium in which she works is the giving of her time to us.

Pouran Esrafily is an artist, actress, and filmmaker who was born in Iran and currently lives and works in Pennsylvania. She has completed numerous works through residencies with the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Studio, including Abandon (1997), featuring the celebrated contemporary artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), and Louise Bourgeois Sunday Salons (2007), which captures Bourgeois in dialogue with art-world luminaries in her New York studio.