Category: Uncategorized

Selfdom / a personal project

21-26 jan 2011, 4-8 pm

I sing because — I am a singer. But I use you for it because I — need ears
Max Stirner

It is more likely that an artist knows his own selfdom more than anybody else. such a vast realm – in his own presumption- which is the centre of the world and affected by the outside world and everything around it. This is the most vulnerable place of all, since the beginning of mankind and will be so, till the end of time.

Probably, there is no king as conscious to his kingdom as him and in the same time, there is no place as unknown as the labyrinth of ego. It is a place that only one person knows its every sheltered spot and obscure corner and it’s him who can let the others inside and show them as much of his selfdom as he likes them to see.

In this exhibition, we decide to show you some of this realm, this is one of those corners that we thought is in need of eyes, to be seen by others. It was an opportunity to show some of the highlights of our minds, a personal project to show our selfdom.

Yashar Samimi Mofakham- Curator
2010

Haftsamar Art Gallery
Add: No.8, 5th Alley,Kooh-e Noor st.,Motahhari Ave. Tehran, Iran
Tel :+9821 88731403

Saroseda will be performing a new series of Audiovisual performances
at Aun Gallery on Tuesday Nov 23rd and  Wednesday 24th 2010.
Don’t miss it if you are in Town and here is the program :

Nov. 23rd :
5-6 pm
Hesam Ohadi – Laptop / Quartz Composer
Siavash Abdi – Tombak
Amir Bahador Ashrafzadeh – VDMX/Modul8

7-8 pm
Arash Salehi – Laptop / Lemur
Ali Ettehad – Avaz
Amir Bahador Ashrafzadeh – Modul8
Saman Tehrani – Processing ( programing language )

November 24th :
5-6pm
Hootan Farzadpoor – Laptop
Mojtaba Alanjari – Divan
Arash Razzazian – Resolume
Aidin Zolghadr – Processing ( programing language )

7-8pm
Arash Salehi – Laptop / Lemur
Golnoosh Salehi – Tar
Arash Razzazian – Resolume

Contemporary Notes
A drawing show, curated by Vahid Sharifian

Image: Drawing by Setareh Shahbazi

Nazgol Ansarinia, Kamrooz Aram, Ali Banisadr, Ala Dehghan, Tala Madani, Arash Sedaghat kish & Setareh Shahbazi.
opens on Friday, 19^th November, 2010 from 5-9 PM. The exhibition will continue through Thursday, 2^ndDecember, 2010 and visting hours are Sunday – Thursday 11 AM-8 PM. not that the  gallery is closed on Friday, 26^th November, 2010

Contemporary Notes is, more than anything, a critique of situation. It questions the situation we are in, while honestly depicting that which we could be in; and that situation is all about art; it is between what is real and what seems real. Crises, their mere existence and sheer diversity, distort thought and obscure reflection making mental isolation and idled creativity seem justified. Meanwhile, deceptive hands of seeming power, encouragingly and outwardly compassionately, attune the artist’s mind from a state of ambitiousness to idleness. Those hands could extend from the social status quo, or represent the interests of those who recklessly drag Middle Eastern art to a local market. The situation in the Middle East is such that instability in the social, economic and political realms causes artists not to reflect on their own world but become tools to – at best – analyze the status quo – in the simplest way possible – and represent it – in a general light. And in the third world, when this exercise in telling the told and stating the obvious takes on the form of photography, or painting or video, it is called art. There is nothing wrong with protesting art but things start to get suspicious when the art leaves the artist behind to turn into a banal manifesto for the political self-expression of people who in these situations merely play the role of a morally sound disgruntled citizen/artist. In these circumstances, rather than reflecting on taste and emotion, and thinking the situation anew, the mind becomes a paragraph of political and social memoire that is framed and sold.

In any case, Contemporary Notes is a group with no political posing and posturing whose significance is not because of the position they take, nor because they express their position, but because of the tone with which they express their situation and play a role, however small, in the international art scene. For they express their thoughts and reflections (or their day-to-day art) in the language and the mood of today’s art. In this exhibition, we are saying that an artist can say new things through the most basic media and in the simplest form regardless of the place from which or in which he or she speaks. All of these seven young artists express themselves unbounded by the place they belong and seek not to market themselves but to be the artists they truly are. So without intellectual self-expression, they see their instinct as the source of the need to think and reflect. And they think according to instinct in a way that taste and emotion, and not their situation (as Iranians) make their work appealing not to the controversies of their times, but to their day.

The idea of this exhibition materialized around last January and it would not have been possible without the help of friends. I wish to thank Afarin Neysari, Jason Reza’ian, Lombard Freid Gallery, Omid Tehrani and Mahdis Keshavarz. And I especially wish to thank my friends Kamruz Aram, Ali Bani-Sadr, Tala Madani, Setareh Shahbazi, Ala Dehghan, Arash Sedaghatkish and Nazgol Ansari-Nia and their galleries for trusting me and leaving their works in my possession to exhibit.

Vahid Sharifian – November 2010

Assar Art Gallery
16 Barforoushan Alley
Iranshahr St. Karimkhan Zand Str.
15836 Tehran – Iran
T/F: +98 21 22 60 72 84
www.assarartgallery.com

On the Treshold

It is not that heavens loathe people of Fearland and impedes rain. It fears to grow a wasteland on the land of anxiety, which, although blooming from seeds of death, it roots and grows and blooms nothing.[i] In the wasteland, where every sapling resembles a dead child, wind is a useless cradle and sunlight is what submits horrifying shadows of the day to the continuity of horrible nights. Under the sunlight, nothing is new, for according to Fearlanders’ beliefs, what has been will be and what has happened is what will happen.[ii] Nothing is new: the new will result in new fears. Thus, every sound resembles a horrible cry: even if it is a breeze passing through wasteland meadows, it comes to ears as a howl. Every movement is threatening, is a shaking of the stature of the people of Fearland who have for long been standing on their motionlessness and silence. Although they have spoken out, their mouths were sealed; they recorded that others have burnt, that they have sown and others have garnered and raped their soil: on top of adobes of fright, with dull eyes and silent tongues, they have built such a tall barrier around themselves.[iii] It is inescapable that they are the barrier. People of Fearland who are afraid and weary of repeating their horrifying history, write the history of fear. Within these walls, fear is a writing style applied to writing of doubt and reading of anxiety. Thus fear robs the pen of fear against the paper of silence and hatred is born thereafter diluting it.[iv] It is as such that, fearing the enemy and his curses, they write in a difficult and incomprehensible language so as to render it a harmless sophistry.[v] Thus they apply to themselves a procedure applied to words. They wrap themselves: faces covered with masks and bodies with sheepskin. In thousand different shapes: an executioner with a dagger in his hand resembles a surgeon while a patient announces cure and miracle with his cries.[vi] Any escape from this enclosure is in vain, even if there is a loophole and they can escape in every direction, still fear is an inescapable shadow, unless they head for their solitude where there is no other, no people, no sunlight and no shadow, no shadow such as that of fear. For, the shadow of man is the shadow of his flesh; hence they escape to the depths of time, to where the glow of day gives clarity only to nightmares while the darkness of night renders delirious the humilities of the day.[vii] There, sleep comes after wake and wake after sleep, over and over again; time transforms into a cyclic eternity without end and it is pointless to think of it and think in it, for if it is spoken out, since there is no audience, it will resemble a delirious monologue, a fearful reverberation of one’s own voice. Be it that solitude is the absence of the other as well as the denial of one’s presence. Such serenity in the absence of others turns into a fear of an inexistent being of one’s self, and baseless fear slides into melancholy. Thus, how difficultly one who has taken refuge in solitude from the harm of the other, recreates him in a different way and in the shape of a ghost resembling herself. Thus the house turns into the mirror of the house of ghosts, reflecting hatred and fear.[viii] People of Fearland embrace their ghosts and give birth to dead children[ix], children calmed down by the sound of the lullaby of death, put to sleep by the aftershock poems of the childbirth of fear[x], who never die again for they have never stepped into the domain of life:

Infants of mothers deprived of singing…[xi]

Homayoon Askari Sirizi, Fearland, Oct. 2010

Translated by Bavand Behpoor

Notes:

[ii] From: Old Testament, Ecclesiastes 1:10.

[iii] Cf. Katayoon Karami, Untitled, 2010

[iv] See: Gazaleh Hedayat, Writing Style, 2010

[v] See: Mehran Mohajer, Whiteboard: Photographer’s Dash-writing, 2009-10.

[vi] For further reading, see: Baktash Sarang Javanbakht, Untitled, combination of mixed media and drawing on paper, 2010.

[vii] Mehraneh Atashi, 2007, series of photographs, 2007

[viii] Ibid. For further reading see: Mehraneh Atashi, Fear and Loathing, 2006.

[ix] See: Barbad Golshiri, Calder for Dead Children, from Freedom Lovelorn series, 2010

[x] Cf. Farhad Fozooni, Poems of Aftershock, 2010.

[xi] Rozita Sharafjahan, It Deprived Me of Song, 2010.