on Nima Esmailpour’s Date-Painting

Date-painting by NimaEsmailpour

Date-painting, an exhibition of Painting/Installation by Nima Esmailpour just opened last Friday, Jan 22nd 2010. The 2nd show of  the brand new  Mohsen Gallery is dedicated to a young artist,  1985 born  Nima Esmailpour previously collaborated with parkingallery in International Roaming Biennial of Tehran and in Limited Access II. You can catch the artist, performing in one of the rooms from 23rd to 25th of Jan.

The catalog of the exhibition features a text  by Omid Mehregan in the ocassion of the exhibition, he will speak to public on Monday 25th Jan. 5pm. The Exhibition will be on view till 27th of Jan and bisting hours are from 4-8.
If you wanna get there, without a car, might have to walk  for a while in the rich Tehrani zafar destrict, starting from Modaress  Zafar Juction. here is a hint to a shortcut instead of  walking in to Dastgerdi (Zafar) St. walk along the Moaddress Highway  eastern sidewalk toward south and without giving yourself a hard time you will find a narrow alley which lead you to Eastern Mina Street and Number is 42 and by now you can see the yellow sign of the gallery on your right and ther you are. You can have a drink and maybe a snack in the small cafe teria located in the backyard,after seeing some art, Enjoy!

Politics of Holidays

By Omid Mehrgan Translated by Bavand Behpoor

1. One not shocked by history misunderstands history and ‘reading history’; even one who is ready to be shocked by history but is not moved by it has a deep misunderstanding regarding his present time.

2. Writing history is actually historiography, for history appears to historical subject not as an object of comprehension or understanding, rather as an elusive image that is to be grasped and rescued. In other words, in the eyes of men, history either does not exist at all or appears to subjects as something unexpected: as a shock.

3. How is history experienced as holidays? Who truly abandons working on holidays suspending all functions of the day waiting for a striking and devastating repetition? Undoubtedly, calendars represent the progression of some sort of historical consciousness: consciousness of an unnatural time, a time not flowing, rather stumbling forward through discontinuities, pauses and lapses. According to Benjamin, calendars measure time in a way different from clocks: their performance is closer to that of time-lapse cameras which, through removal of intermediate frames, record in twenty or thirty seconds the lengthy process of an event such as the blooming of a flower. As a result of photographing the evolution of a plant at certain points of time and replaying it at the natural speed of the projector, the blooming of a plant will happen in twenty seconds. Calendars do the same thing to the historical time. Distinguished dates of a calendar (such as days of festivity and holidays) resemble frames following one another with fixed intervals disrupting the flow of consequent days, thus revealing a sudden development not through the continuity of a temporal continuum rather through rupture, discontinuity and lapse.

4. But who chooses which calendar? Who names the days and defines holidays? We know that every revolution has brought with it a new calendar and is able to render as the withering of a flower what was previously portrayed as blooming. That is because revolutions are supposed to be great ruptures in the fabric of historical time. However, calendars are failed and even delirious attempts in recording the ruptures of the historical time, for they are finally based on a kind of repetition: in each year, there is a single date which is a holiday. A single event is remembered: the festivity is incorporated and integrated in the monotonous and continuous movement of ordinary days. The problem with calendars is their reliance on a cinematic understanding of the historical past, rather than a photographic one.

5. Historiography is similar to creating constellations out of nighttime stars of the sky of history: the stars are the events and dates of the past whose brightness is dependent upon their proximity or distance. The work of historiographer is to place a piece of the past and a piece of the present in one constellation. Who in what position and based on which logic creates a constellation? Creating a constellation is not an arbitrary action rather one intertwined with the political demands of the present. The image of history is actually only in danger when shining as a disappearing memory. The work of historiographer is grasping and taking possession of this image or memory, an image which, according to Benjamin, is about to disappear forever in every present time not considering itself as intended in that image. (The fifth of the Theses on the Concept of History.)

6. Whenever historiographer singles out a certain event or historical period, he directly turns it into the pre-history of his present. This present time can create a constellation with absolutely any moment of the past, a constellation which is supposed to make the present time critical. The historiographer names the dates and gives the years their physiognomy or their special character and makes known the anonymous.

7. The historiographer does not live in a safe present time eternally on the move, rather he can confront the image of the past in the moment when time freezes and comes to a standstill. What has been, as well as the present time, suddenly freeze into an elusive image. As such, the images of history maintain no similarity to the pictures hanging on gallery walls among which the historiographer chooses while strolling. On the contrary, the image of the past is similar to the sudden short shine of light in a firework at a dark night.

8. There is no such thing as the eternal image of the past. The historical subject who is the subject of politics itself or the subject emerging from politics is actually predicting the past and changing it. Thus, holidays can change, repetitions can stop and the zero-point can be displaced. All this process depends on the danger and necessity hidden in the present time.

Appendix. Redeemed man needs no calendar, and needs clocks even less than that; that is not because natural time has frozen for him and he lives in a kind of eternity, rather because all moments and days of his past can immediately connect to his present and turn into a popular issue of the day. He can quote and recount any moment of his past in any moment of the present and it is not without ground that in the eyes of the redeemed man, all days are holidays.