Don’t miss Amin Davaie’s Photo Installation this week at Mohsen Art Gallery, opened yesterday is an impressive installation of 30 Digital frames bearing a portrait each and their gaze to the camera says a thousand words silently, the sound track is composed by Nima Pourkarimi and doubles the impact with cleverness and cruelty at the same time. The show is on view till 21 July. 2010, 4 – 8 pm  and there is an artist talk is scheduled for  Mon. 19th of July. 2010 From 6 to 8 pm.

Look at Me and Remember Yourself The past year was populated by deadly events that happened to us continuously without disruption. The burden of agony was manifestly reflected visually, normatively and vocally in the artworks of this or that gallery in different parts of the city. The artist citizen accepted a heavy dutyin these events and paid a high price for it However, among the witnesses of the event, photography as a medium turned into an interactive real-time medium and connected the picturesof the event to the most wide-spread media of mass communication Today, confronted with Amin Davaie’s work, one feels a historical lump in throat and sees the eyes of a nation who dreamt while standing in front of history accusing others Amin Davaie’s installation is made of thirty photo frames of eight inches in a 150 by 150cm square exhibited in a dark room. The multi-frame technique has succeeded in creating something between photography and motion pictures. The light on portraits is from the right hand side. The actors of this tragedy have been selected among citizens and young friends of the artists and put in front of the camera. The white andbright background resembles personal photographs: as in documentary photography, they are standing in front of us without any mediation The media of photography has the potential and the valuable content of naked and sharp reality. This quality has an immediacy which renders the mortality of life. On the other hand, photographs are undeniable documents in the face of alteration of truth hidden in subjects. In certain cases, it is a unique weapon against the oblivion and denial of formal media. In this cycle of value and anti-value, a representationof the challenge between life and death is exhibited This is a movie-like artwork in which certain frames have moved out of the orbit of regular movement. Or from a different viewpoint, they are images which through juxtaposition have turned into slowly moving motion pictures whose different aspects and hidden meanings wecomprehend by conceptual layering First of all, the installation implies that this group can represent the agents of protesting Secondly, the portraits constitute the common patterns of our society, and in a certain respect, they are the actors of a reality happeningnot in society but in the artist’s studio. They appear metaphorical Thirdly, by confronting us the group calls to judgment the collective consciousness of the beholder. In a minimalistic way, the work is comprised of LCDs in a designed dark space with a double meaning. The first meaning is that it surrounds the audience and the second, it recounts of an event in the insecure nights of a long wait of a prisoner illustrating his loneliness and fear of being lost in the dusts of time The images are accompanied with a heavy musical noise that like a medium fills the temporal gaps of the work and reconstructs vague andderogatory images happening to us. The musical text resembles the harsh sound of a cold metal scrubbed on audience’s nerves and reverberates passing through the swollen eyes of the performers in the empty space of the event. Their strange faces, in times tired, in timestortured, aggressive, innocent, surprised or metamorphosed, narratesIn front of them, we stare at the visage of history

ziaï / July 2010

New Folder 01
Presenting a selection of young talented Iranian photographers

Sasan Abri | Ehsan Barati | Kiana Farhoudi | Poolad Javaher Haghighi | Mahboubeh Karamli | Tahmineh Monzavi | Anahita Norouzi | Aidin RahimiPourAzad | Hossein Rajabi | Farideh Sakhaei | Reza Shojaei | Nasrin Talebi

Curated by Arash Fayez

Opening: Friday 16 July 2010 – 4 to 8 p.m
17 to 26 July 2010
Sat. to Wed., 11 a.m to 7 p.mThur. 5 to 8 p.m
Open discussion with artists: Thursday 22 July 2010, at 6 p.m
Read the rest of this entry »

Payman Abbasian, Martin Shamounpour and Amirali Ghasemi are off to berlin to take part in Circus Charivari’s Freakshow, to realize some performances, Interactive pieces and sound projects in Berlin. Check some of the images here ….

PATTERNS
Nazgol Ansarinia’s Solo Show at Aun Art Gallery

Fri, 28 May 2010 – Fri, 18 Jun 2010

Click here to see the works on Aun Art Gallery webiste

The exhibition “Patterns” consists of works from two series Ansarinia has been working on for the past three years; Nonflammable, Non-stick, Non-stain  from 2009-2010 and Patterns from 2007-2009. These works are shown together because, according to the artist, there are enough similarities and differences between them that makes them complimentary to each other.

In a way both series are based on finding ways to insert information and further meaning onto objects already familiar and perhaps overlooked. The work series Patterns uses the Persian carpet as an everyday object to do so. This collection of drawings inspired by the familiar images and experiences of life in Iran plays with the visual potentials of this wold-recognised object/image. While the main subjects are contemporary, the drawings retain the structure of carpets and combine new images with the original patterns. These new patterns are therefore familiar in terms of their form but convey very different meanings to that of their origin.

In Nonflammable, Non-stick, Non-stain, the objects used and the subject matter are again both based on mundanities, but this time the method for their combination is less apparent, or in other words it is more abstract or coded. The plastic sofreh or table cloth is an unremarkable object found in most Iranian homes but sofreh in its literal sense is also a metaphor for one’s economic status in Iranian culture. Playing with the literal meaning and its actual functionality, sofreh is used as a medium to carry data about the repetitious subject of daily expenses. Visually manipulating the original decorative patterns of the plastic tablecloths, statistical reports of daily expenses are inserted onto these everyday used objects. The method of building a system by relating numerical values to visuals is not unlike the way visuals are used in representing statistics in different fields of science. However the purpose of these visual charts is not to simplify data, but for them to morph into common patterns.

Sam Keshmiri and Shahab Tondar were this month’s guests of Patil art group in Kashan…
Presenting their works and publications by NEWBOOKZ.

link

Ghoori | Sohrab Mostafavi Kashani

We still waiting for more details in English!

TEHRAN ZOO

Arash Radkia + Arash Khakpour

TEHRAN ZOO is an experimental documentary by up and coming Iranian film makers Arash Khakpour and Arash Radkia. The film portrays the wildlife zoo in Tehran, Iran.Tehran zoo has been shown in Tehran and Cario a part of LIMITED ACCESS II video program and in parkingallery’s IRAN vs. in Istanbul at PiST, as well as Kashan university of art. Follow the link for more info.
Read the rest of this entry »

TWELVE CUBED
Aun Art Gallery
12 artists, 12 Chairs and 12 Cubes
Nazgol Ansarinia,Behrou Bagheri, Ala Dehghan, Amirali Ghasemi,
Mohamad Hamzeh, Farid Jahangir, Bahman Kiarostami, Shohreh Mehran,
Farshid Mesghali, Houman Mortazavi, Atila Pesyani, Myriam Quiel
Opening: Friday 21 May 2010, from 16:00 to 20:00
End: 26 May 2010, 20:00
Visiting Hours Saturday to Wednesday 11:00 to 20:00

12³ is an unusual art project involving a relentless organizer, a furniture designer, a pioneering group of artists and a galley-as-playground. Each artist was given a chair and a cube to work on, and challenged to think of them as blank canvases. Individually, the pieces reflect each artist’s take on the challenge; together, they tell a short story of a time-specific cooperation. Trans-generational – from celebrated figures to the new generation of Iranian artists – the project reveals the creativity that emerges when art is looked at as a game.
Read the rest of this entry »