collaborative project

  • Future: as a Point of Departure

    led by Amirhossein Khorshidfar and Bahar Ahmadifard

    “Future: as a Point of Departure” is a collaborative educational program inspired by the concept of Prospective Archeology by the philosopher and media theorist Siegfried Zielinski and formed on “The History of Persian Music” by Ruhollah Khaleqi. First, we will jointly read the text of the History of Persian Music (which has outstanding and unrecognized potential ) and study its historical framework regarding Nasir al-Din Shah’s diary and “All Those Years without Memory,” written by Alireza Mashayekhi.
    In the next stage, the main concept of the “Future: as a Point of Departure” project is to release and realize the locked forces of the Persian novel. What has been fundamentally reversed in this composition is that the departure point is outside of Persian literary texts but is inclined toward the future Persian novel. The History of Persian Music is a real example of intertextuality and combines history, literary self-portrait, music encyclopedia, lived experience, and autobiography.
    Under a common framework, each workshop participant follows one of the aspects of the text in an independent project in their artistic media. While the final works are autonomous, we hope these projects will establish an enlightening and meaningful association, just like the components of a unique constellation.

  • Enghelab St. Local Bookstores

    For my master’s thesis, I focused on one hundred critical texts (essays/articles/reviews) about contemporary Iranian photography from 1990 to 2019. After my two-year research on Iranian contemporary photography, I realized that these 100 texts could constitute the discourse of the critical literature relevant to photography that has emerged over recent decades n Iran. You can see some excerpts of them on the gallery wall. By doing so, I intended to find the potential capacity to extract a hidden intertextual conversation among them.
    In the present installation titled “disruption and continuity,” I highlighted two recurrent failures that can be recognized in the critical view of Iranian photography. According to the writers of these texts, these two shortcomings have prevented the formation of the continuous flow of art that we know in the chronological lists of periods in Western art history, so they have taken away the possibility of producing a coherent and modern art history out of the contemporary art projects by Iranian artists. These two are 1) the lack of historical observation and contextualization from the art historians and critics and 2) the need for authentic representation of the lived experience in Iran’s cultural/social circumstances from the artists’ part.
    The cogwheel embedded between the texts on the wall converts “flow” into “split units.” A mechanism that temporarily interrupts the continuous flow of motion with timely intervention (As in the clock, the flow of time is limited to a comprehensible quantity.) The cogwheel machine is a sign, a hieroglyphic semantic unit that will respond to the basic issues of contemporary Iranian art criticism.