Neda Razavipour’s Selfservice at Azad Art Gallery
No 5, Salmas Sq,Golha Sq, Tehran
4th & 5th of December 2009 , 4-8 pm
Poster Designed by Farhad Fozouni
More information soon! ( Press Release was not coming with a text, but we loved the poster! )

Obtuse Meaning and An Economy of Excess:
Reading (in) Detail in Melika Shafahi’s Photographs

Foad Torshizi *

“This text has been originally written to accompany the present series by Melika Shafahi published in Gwangju Biennale’s catalog and is reproduced in parkingallery.com with the permission of the author. It cannot be copied, reproduced, or used in any way without the author’s permission. Please do not cite or circulate this reproduction.”

The series of untitled staged photographs by Melika Shafahi, with their painstaking attentiveness to costume design and makeup, present an atmosphere that mimics the very mechanisms deployed in fashion photography to fabricate desire and perpetuate commodity culture. These strategies of mimicry involve highlighting sculpted bodies, glamorous costumes, and makeup in order to produce conventional ideals of physical and sartorial beauty. However, Shafahi’s imitation of fashion photography does not suggest her desire to attain the status of this genre. Instead, through the use of trivial visual elements that are vexingly out of place (e.g. a ketchup bottle or a propane container), her photographs provoke a feeling of incongruity with conventional standards of fashion. In this sense, her photographs exemplify John Tagg’s broader observation about photography and meaning: “[...] the picture is always too little or too large—obdurately saying less than is wanted and more than is wished” (Tagg, 2009: xxxvi). Melika Shafahi’s photographs fail to fully emulate fashion photography, but it is precisely in this failure, which I call intentional, that her photographs say “more than is wished” in fashion photography. Shafahi’s untitled series, leaves an unsewn tear on its own fabric, which she playfully protects them from seamlessness and finish that are vital to fashion photography.

These tears, however, only appear when we read these pictures intimately, only when we read them up-close, when we physically remove the space between these two-dimensional objects and us in order to build a passionate relationship between our bodies and the photographs. It is only through this physically intimate relation that our eyes are opened to her photographs’ intentional failure as fashion photography and its rubric of enforced perfection. The proximity of our bodies to the photographs also grants us an ability to read intimately, to read in detail. The significance of an intimate reading of details is not only limited to the value of methodological heterogeneity that affords us a perspective that openly accepts the tendency in photography to slip away from the hands of disciplinary knowledge production, but also leads us to a diverse economy of marginal implications, often violently obscured by the predominance of a single central meaning. Naomi Schor, the American literary critic and theorist, writes that photographic detail, as discussed by Roland Barthes, “is marked [...] by its participation in an economy of excess. It always enjoys the status of supplement, a luxurious extra. [...] the detail which draws and holds Barthes’ attention is like the fetishist’s fetish, a detail which, camouflaged by its perfect banality, goes unnoticed by others” (Schor, 1987: 91).

It strikes me how the terms camouflage and fetish in the statement by Schor resonate with the visuals in Shafahi’s untitleds.

It is only through these minuscule details that we can foster an engagement with her photographs that allows us to change our perspective and let her work become something different. These details, however minute, perform effectively enough to be able to create anomalies: an uncomfortable toe, hiding under the sharp edges of a coffee table; a propane container, a hose attached to it, and an unlit rope creating an accidental and unintended shape on the ground; a plastic ketchup bottle; and finally, a nettlesome shadow on the walls of a decaying background, all of which emerge as a menace to fashion’s obsession with perfection. This supplementary, decentered, and marginal economy of excess serves as our very luxurious clues to interpret one significant meaning of her work: a deliberate failure to pass for fashion photography. Although her models might easily appear in Vogue or in Harper’s Bazaar, she playfully creates these anomalies in order to tell us that her photographs will not fit. Shafahi leaves us hints to realize that her work is never enough or as Tagg puts it is “obdurately saying less than is wanted”; that it never fulfills our desire to articulate its meaning; that it does not allow us to identify the photographs as fashion photography; and that they slip, no matter how hard we try to grasp them.

Then there is another playful failure: Shafahi fails to meet the vexing standards and expectations of Middle Eastern artists. She is an Iranian artist living in France: a wonderful combination that fits into disturbing categorizations of Western galleries and museums, hysterically hunting for any work that will echo a problematic vocabulary comprised of terms such as the Middle East, female artist, exile, the Diaspora, plight of women and so forth. But her work does not exhibit the famous dark veil, nor does it perpetuate the stereotype of victimized and voiceless Iranian women. The tenuous, though intentional and self-reflexive, Persian calligraphic inscription on the bodies of her models speaks to this failure. She oscillates between gestures of exoticization and expressions of envy for a mode of representation, from which Iranian women have been excluded from via a homogenizing force that camouflages them under the dark veil. Notwithstanding the latent possibilities to be misconstrued as either, she deliberately fails to present any of them. But she does not fail to remind us, obstinately, of our own failure to pin down “the meaning” in her works. She leaves us subtle inklings to the tension at the heart of the failed pursuit of the subjectivities constructed in her photographs and to fit into a Western subject position that creates, consumes, and controls fashion. It is through this obscure meaning that Shafahi’s works surpass the limits of fashion photography, dismantle its desire machine, unsettle the very mechanisms of fabrication of subjectivity, and perform effectively as a critique of identity politics in the time of a globalized world.

*Foad Torshizi is a doctoral student of Art History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

by Ehsan Arjmand

Play,Pause: FERRERI
is an Exhibition by Fatemeh Pasha and Ehsan Arjmand will open at LALEH Art Gallery on Sunday, 29 November 2009 at 16:00.
Fatemeh Pasha and Ehsan Arjmand have been fascinated by films by an Italian director unknown to many Iranians film fans, Marco Ferreri (1928 – 1997). They take their inspirations from 3 of his movies for their interpretational journey through medium of painting , the result Is play,pause: FERRERI.

by Fatemeh Pasha

Pasha and Arjmand tend to continue this way of working with a close link with cinema medium in their future projects.
The exhibition will be on view till Wednesday, 09 December 2009 at 19:00.

Address:
Laleh Art Gallery, Next to  Laleh Hotel, Fatemi Street, Tehran

URBAN JEALOUSY update!
a selection of audio works by Sound & Performance Artists from Roaming Biennial of Tehran will be on air through Herbst Radio
Selected by Serhat Koksal , Enjoy!

URBAN JEALOUSY | Sound & Performance Artists from Roaming Biennial of Tehran

• Gözel Radio – Kiskaniyorum
• Kost J Picunda – Schlesi Ambulance
• Klimek  – in Katamon
• Arash Khosronejad – G Street Drama
• FatMoon – Bagdad Dub
• Martin Shamoon Pour – New World Full of Jealousy
• Nasir Al Mazam – ToBeOrNotToBe
• Bethanien NewYorck – Mieten Stop
• Sena Çevik – Agac Tree
• D2GG – Radio Guitar
• Bijan Moosavi – Shahr-e Siah
• Ballgard – Ghahere
• Gudubik – Draadspanner
• Paul Devens – Treppenhaut
• Nicolas Wiese [-hyph-]  – Realness Notorious Big
• Utku Tavil – The Person You Have Called Can Not Be Reached At The Moment
• K.O.F.Y – Slow ( Live on Tehran Roaming Biennial in Belgrade )

Double Life of Khosrow by Bijan Moosavi

11 min,2009
Khosrow’s life has ups and downs. Some days everything is
nice and happy, some days everything is messy and uneasy.
Khosrow’s life goes on as long as I manipulate it.

Double Life of Khosrow was screened for the 1st time as a part of parkingallery’s Limited Access II at Azad Art Gallery.

“Ekbatan, West Of Tehran” by Behnam Sadighi

Ekbatan; West of Tehran by Behnam Sadighi

Sunday November 29, 2009 – Thursday December 10, 2009
from 4:00pm – 8:00pm
Aria Art Gallery
No 11- Zarrin Alley- After Shahid Beheshti St-
Vali E Asr St Tehran, Tehran Get Directions
The exhibition features 25 black and white photos taken in “Ekbatan” the Mega residential complex  in west of Tehran during 2004-2008.
Gallery is closed from Nov.4 through Nov.6

Mohammadreza Mirzaei

Mohammadreza Mirzaei at Osservatorio Gualino

Osservatorio Gualino, a center for contemporary photography in Turin in collaboration with Consorzio Villa Gualino will hold a slide show/conference program on Iranian photographer Mohammadreza Mirzaei.

Mohammadreza Mirzaei (born. 1986), is a photographer working and living in Tehran, whose work has been featured at Dubai’s The Empty Quarter Gallery, Tehran’s Seyhoun Gallery and Mall Galleries in London, among other galleries.

Michael Kenna has acclaimed his photos as a comment or exploration of the nature of human condition, and Mitra Tabrizian has admired the surreal quality and the sense of isolation in his works.

UN IRANIANO A TORINO

Slide Show e conferenza di Mohammadreza Mirzaei

A cura di Fulvio Bortolozzo
Friday November 27, 2009 – 18:00
Osservatorio Gualino
Villa Gualino
viale Settimio Severo 63, 10133 Torino
http://www.osservatoriogualino.net/
Tel. 348.774.7360

Time to listen # 1
A tale of 13 days – first day – wait and see by Erfan Abdi

Erfan writes:

A tale of 13 days – first day – wait and see
Iranian folk
There was this street singer that we recorded his sound in our studio (at the time that I was working at Darya Digital Studio in Tehran). His name was Mash Gholaam Hossein, he was from Ghoochan, and played a wood wind there known as Ney Dolabeh.
so here I edited his song and made an atmosphere for it.

we are very happy to present you “Candlelight And Its Side Effects”
documentation of the new Interactive Video Installation by Payman Abbasian for parkingallery’s Limited Access II.
This is how Payman himself describes his works:

I’ve been analyzing the video from a web-cam to find the highest concentration of brightness, then I use it as an starting point to apply/add computer generated fluid waves and particles to it as if it’s coming out of the fire, I found it an interesting idea to create an live interactive experience, using processing as its programming environment that’s why I decided to called it like this.

Exhibition from November 17th to December 17th 2009 / Opening on November 17th, from 6 to 9 p.m.

VOICE OF VISION
Ten persian visions on contemporary Man.

Photographie © Mehdi Vosoughnia

PHOTOGRAPHY
Kourosh Adim
Mehrva Arvin
Niloufar Banisadr
Naghmeh Ghassemlou
Tooraj Khamenehzadeh
Babak Kazemi
Majid Kourang Beheshti
Taha Moghani
Javid Ramezani
Mehdi Vosoughnia

In collaboration with Mehrva gallery, Teheran.

Photographie © Mehdi Vosoughnia

Galerie Spéos
7 rue Jules Vallès, 75011 Paris
01 40 09 18 58

www.speos.fr