Displaced Histories, Plot-holes and Traumatized Materials: Workshop with Azar Mahmoudian 5.-7.Mai 2015 Auditorium

/ April 20, 2015

Displaced Histories, Plot-holes and Traumatized Materials:

Reflections on the Material base of Contemporary Iranian Art

 

chris markerNoriyuki-Haraguchi-installing-Oil-Pool-at-the-Museum-of-Contemporary-Art-of-Tehran-1977

Workshop with Azar Mahmoudian

5.-7.Mai 2015 Auditorium

This workshop will take two images as its entry points. The first image is constituted of two panoramic photographs of Persepolis and Abadan Refinery edited together for a volume of Petite Planete on Iran, designed in 1957 by the french filmmaker Chris Marker. The second image is a view of the big pit hole, the central slope of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, filled with Noriyuki Haraguchi’s oil pool Matter and Mind (1977), Alexander Calder’s performing mobile Orange Fish (1946), two portraits of the leaders of Iran since 1979 revolution, and Otto Piene›s inflatable Seven Stars, as seen in March 2015.

Starting from these two images, we are going to talk about a current and topical subject, the visual politics of oil.

The main question here is how can we understand these landscapes as layerings of history, and how can we can trace a visual transformation from a clean juxtaposition of a glorified past and a progressive future, to a perpetual structure – a landscape of buried, resurrected and dislocated histories, and the indeterminacy of frustration and hope.

The material basis of Iranian modern and contemporary art will be taken into account in two senses. We will discuss the transformations in the material, social and historical conditions, and the support structures which determine the production of art in Iran since the 1950s.

We will also look at some examples of the particular ways through which Iranian modern and contemporary artists reflected on the materials used in their works. Especially we will try to look at their articulations

when they wanted to define an artistic language wary of its position in the international context of modernism and the global context of contemporary art. (We will study the ways they have manifested their takes about temporality and history on one hand, and avant-gardism and universalism in the modern era on the other through the material they used.)

At stake here are not only those artists who illustrated the story of oil, but more importantly the set of ideas which emerged from the politics of oil and the rentier state, and defined the condition for the articulation of art, culture and national identity.

The workshop will take place in english.

For registration and info please contact: daniela.reina@hfk-bremen.de

Azar Mahmoudian (born 1981, lives in Tehran) is an independent curator and researcher. She received her MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2009. Her research focuses on issues of archival and historical modes of cultural representations. She has curated exhibitions and screenings for the Cultuurcentrum, Bruges; Contemporary Art Brussels; and School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She collaborates with Tehran-based project spaces, and was a 2014 Fellow of Global Art Forum 8, Dubai.

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