Category: What we dig!

Artists:
Nazanin Aharipour|Mojtaba Amini|Golrokh Broumandi|Ali Ettehad|Farid Jafari Samarghandi|Setareh Masoumbeiki|Setareh Jabbari|Behrad Javanbakht|Sona Safaie|Melika Shafahi|Milad Houshmandzadeh

Curator : Amirali Ghasemi

Bruges(Bel) : 24 october -2 november 2010 in the buildings of
‘La Brugeoise’, Vaartdijkstraat 5-7, 8200 Bruges.
Horizon 1: towards a new curatorial platform in the Cultural Centre.

The Cultuurcentrum of Bruges launches its new international curatorial platform called Horizon on the 24th of october 2010. The Cultuurcentrum intends to invite each year one or more guest curators, who develop a range of new projects within the Horizon frame work, both in Bruges as in other countries. In Horizon we focus on the personal and local perspective of the guest curator in relation to the international context. For the first edition the independent Iranian curator Amirali Ghasemi (*1980, Tehran) conceived the multi-layered, itinerant art project Iran&co, together with his curatorial team and the participating artists.

Iran 2005-2010.
The last five years, the international art world was engulfed by hundreds of exhibitions and publications dealing with art from Iran and the Middle East, with again an emphasis on Iran.
In so far that some voices speak, since 2005, about an ‘Iran Boom’.
This ‘new artistic wave’ brings to mind memories of the ‘sudden apparition’ of contemporary art from China, India or Eastern Europe, in the nineties.
The curatorial team of Iran&co started to analyse this phenomenon, emphasizing the specific Iranian condition, both within Iran and the diaspora, and its different representations produced in a mainly ‘western context’.This explains moreover the choice of the title: Iran&co. It refers to the realm of companies and multinationals, the businessess actually producing the brand ‘Iran’.

Lastly, Iran&co functions also as a trope for other typical national, identity based or so-called ethnic-cultural projects.

Iran&co, the Archive, Documentary: Iran Beyond Borders (1960-2010)

Iran&co consist of three distinct parts: an exhibition, an archive and a documentary installation, which evolves constantly in time and space.In Bruges the visitor will witness a first presentation of this project. The archive and documentary installation on show, cover only a fraction of the existing material.In the second stage in London(fall 2011), a more elaborated version will be exhibited.The first part consists of a site specific Exhibition of contemporary art, made by 11 emerging artists, mostly under 30,9 based in Iran and 2 studying outside the country (in France & Canada).

The exhibition consists of exclusively commissioned art works, which is a totally different approach to most projects held in the contemporary Iranian context expect for few biennial appearances, where the focus lies on object related artworks conceived chiefly for galleries and collectors. In Iran&co, the artists tackle a wide range of issues central to the Iran&co project such as: ‘The question of identity in thematic based exhibitions, the production and representation of forms of ‘Iranianness’, the status of the artist from a performative perspective, the reanactment of the position of the ‘Iranian artist’, themes as the void, absence and invisibility as part of the Iranian condition beside the humour and playfulness in often metaphorical textual and sculptural forms invisibility as part of the Iranian condition, the question of neo-Orientalism, etc.

The second part consists of an extensive Archive, which in the first exhibition stage in Bruges focusses mainly on the exhibitions with art from Iran, and held in the West in the last decade.Besides the important cartographic dimension, the Archive can shed light on a range of representations, exotic and other stereotypes about the current Iranian condition.

The third part consists of the extensive video-documentary Iran beyond borders’(1960- 2010). The curatorial team gathered more then 100 new interviews with some of the key players, from both in Iran and outside the country. This is an ongoing process which will be shown to the public in London in 2011 and probably beyond in different forms and formats.As with the Archive, the documentary installation is important for the cartography of both modernist and contemporary art movements. Further more it gives the visitor some incisive views on the Iran Boom, and the general artistic history of Iran from 1960 till now.

Unique interviews with Rose Issa, Shadi Ghadirian, Anthony Downey, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hamid Keshmirshekan, Okwui Enwezor, Khosrow Hassansadeh Catherine David, Farshid Mesghali, Alireza SamiAzar, Vali Mahlouji, Shadi Mahmoudian, Koroosh Adim, Iman Afsarian, Rozita sharfjahan, Hamid Severi, Jinoos Taghizadeh, Haleh Anvari , Poya Arianpour, Mahmoud Bakhshi and Barbad Golshiri, among many other artists, collectors, curators and experts.

Info: Cultuurcentrum Brugge, 00 32 50 44 30 40

Curatorial team: Amirali Ghasemi, Michel Dewilde, Azar Mahmoudian
Poster designed by Behrad Javanbakht

The exhibtion travels to London (november 2011) & Berlin (october 2012)
Organisation: Cultuurcentrum Brugge in collaboration with Parkingallery Tehran

www.ccbrugge.be, www.parkingallery.com
www.iranandco.com, www.ccbhorizon.be