Someone Was Here | Shirin Sabahi at Gallery No 6 | Tehran

Someone Was Here
Shirin Sabahi at Gallery No 6
Opening: Friday, March 5, 17:00 – 20:00

Shirin Sabahi’s work evolves from 8-mm films taken by Jan Edman (1928), a retired Swedish engineer who traveled to Iran nearly 15 times between 1966 and 1979. He visited different Iranian cities on behalf of a Swedish consulting and engineering company for the purpose of realizing industrial projects commissioned by various Iranian state-owned and private industries.
In the video installation Swede Home 1966/1973/1975/2009*, through cameraman’s gaze in his films and his vague remembrances of his trips thirty years after, Sabahi takes the audience back to Iran of the ‘60s and the ‘70s where she herself has no physical experience of. Activating this non-lived past by means of someone else’s recollections, Sabahi introduces Edman’s arbitrary narration to this history which her generation carries variety of it through different modes of transference; from parents and education to media.

In the photo series Untitled (00’00’’) still images of Edman’s films from Iran and Sweden are presented as double-exposed photographs. In these photographs, Edman’s visual documentation of the dual locations he lived and worked in points at the current condition of human mobility and displacement.

Shirin Sabahi (B. 1984, Tehran) received her BA in Industrial Design from Iran University of Science and Technology in 2007 and her MFA from Malmö Art Academy in 2009. Her work has been exhibited at various venues including HISK, Gent; Mercosur Biennial, Brazil; Pavilhão 28, Lisbon and rum46, Århus among others.

* Only one of the 2-channel video projections of Swede Home will be on display at Gallery No. 6.

Gallery No. 6
No 6, 18th st, Kheradmand-e Shomali, Tehran
March 5 – 10, 2010
Sat – Wed 15:00 – 19:00
Tel: +9821 88346029