Public Presentations: Artist/ Curators
A Talk By Amirali Ghasemi
Jan 7, 2020 | 6pm
Hosted by New Media Projects
Amirali Ghasemi delivered a public presentation entitled “Artist/Curators: Defy the Competitive Norms.” The presentation delved into the collaborative relationship between artists and curators, focusing on creating a space for collective activities.
Ghasemi provided an overview of curatorial activities in Iran over the past few decades, specifically emphasizing contextual activities within the current situation. He maintained a critical distance from the active agents involved in the art space to account for a nonlinear or rhizomatic quality, integrity, and continuity.
The presentation also questioned whether the current situation in Iran provides the context to define curatorial activity as a ‘career’ and explored both visible and hidden aspects of curatorship. Ghasemi suggested several alternative ways of making exhibitions, such as curating moving images and film collections, working with non-profit groups, touring curatorial activities, geography-based community work, focusing on libraries and oral history methods as raw material, thinking of a magazine or website as a presentation format, and transcending disciplinary borders and turning to other fields such as architecture and literature.
About Amirali Ghasemi
Amirali Ghasemi (b.1980, Iran) is a curator, media artist, and graphic designer based in Tehran. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from Azad University, Central Tehran Branch, in 2004, with a thesis on “Research In Digital Art History.” In 1998, Ghasemi founded “Parkingallery,” an independent project space in Tehran; then, in 2002, he set up Parkingallery.com: an online platform for young Iranian artists. Ghasemi has shown his photographs, videos, and design works at internationally various festivals and exhibitions. As a curator, he has been directing many exhibitions, workshops, and talks for Parkingallery projects, such as “Deep Depression” (2004-06) and “Sideways” (2008). He has co-curated The Urban Jealousy, the 1st International Roaming Biennial of Tehran (2008-09), and eight editions of Limited Access Festival for Sound/Video and Performance (2007-19). He is working with photography, video, installation, and interactive projects, besides writing on the Tehran art scene and contemporary Iranian art for various magazines and his own art-log. IRAN&CO is his ongoing curatorial project, an ongoing exhibition, and an archive of Iranian art representation beyond the border. In the summer of 2014, Ghasemi co-funded New Media Society, a network-based research platform and library. He joined the Postgraduate M.A. Course “Art in Context” at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2015, and in 2017 left it unfinished to return to Iran and focus on his media arts and curatorial projects at New Media Society and Tamaas Foundation.
Poetica Project in collaboration with New Media Society
Online Lecture by Khalil Dermanaki: “Production of place in the Stories of Abu-torab Khosravi”
Date: Tuesday, February 16, 2021
Hours: 6 to 8 p.m.
In this online lecture, Khalil Dermanki, who has previously written several articles and essays on the works of Aboutorab Khosravi, addressed the issue of producing a fictional space focusing on the works of Aboutorab Khosravi. Amir Hossein Khorshidfar hosted this meeting.
About Abu-torab Khosravi:
Abu-torab Khosravi(21 March 1956, Shiraz, Iran) has obtained a special place among the third generation of Iranian fiction writers through writing a collection of stories under the title of Havieh and Divan-e-Soomanat and two novels titled Asfar-e-Kateban and Rood-e-Ravi.
About Khalil Dermanaki:
Khalil Dermanki, prominent literary critic, has been continuously collaborating with literary magazines since 1998 and has judged several important literary awards.
Public Presentations (01): Artist/ Curators
A Talk By Negar Farajiani
Feb 2, 2020 | 6pm
Moderator: Amirali Ghasemi
Hosted by New Media Projects
This series of meetings will focus on the works of artists who took the initiative and strived to achieve the spaces and platforms for dialogue and actions.
We will examine the on-going or paused projects that can help us imagine, recognize, appreciate, and possibly change and improve the current situation. These sessions will be documented, along with research projects from “Artist/Curators”, to be published gradually via an online platform.
About Negar Farajiani
Born in 1977 in Yazd, Iran, Negar Farajiani, trained as a painter and graphic designer, Negar Farajiani works at the convergence of diverse media as an artist and curator. Farajiani plays with the concept of space, both private and public. Increasingly, Farajiani s work has focused on cooperation with other artists and participatory actions. She has presented her practices domestically and internationally through exhibitions and lectures. Recent appearances and exhibitions have been hosted by Yale Macmillan Center at Yale Univesity, New Haven, Connecticut, the Silk Road Gallery, Tehran, Iran, the Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Poland, Artissima Art Fair Presented by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, the Pasfarda Arts and Cultural Exchange in Chicago, and Cheryl and Richard Ruszat Scholarship at the University of California.
Dustopedia: Radio Dust
Apr 3, 2019
Narrated by Arash Khosronejad / Bahar Ahmadifard – Produced by New Media Society – Tehran
Radio Dust attempts to follow parallel stories a portrait of the small Project space in the heart of Tehran and an ongoing project called Dustopedia, a collectively-curated encyclopedia. Along the way Bahar Ahmadifard takes us by the hand and will explain how she gets acquainted with the small institution, how she as a writer and photography critique got herself familiar with the Parking Video Archive and Moving Dust, a traveling video program touring in different cities Tehran, Shiraz, Kerman, Bandar Abbas, and Isfahan, while hearing fragments of the soundtracks of the films and videos in the program.
Besides we enjoy listening to various sound artists and musicians who collaborated with us in the past years. Carefully selected works by Ali Farzadi (Isfahan), Leonie Roessler(The Hague), Rahi Sinaki (Tehran/Vienna) and Kasra Pashaei (Tehran), who were invited to contribute to the podcast. This marks the start of a new chapter for Dustopedia.
On Radio Dust, we also listen to readings of a text by Nebras Hoveizavi on Dust in Mysticism, commissioned by Obieg Magazine – Poland.
Radio Dust attempts to follow parallel stories a portrait of the small Project space in the heart of Tehran and an ongoing project called Dustopedia, a collectively-curated encyclopedia. Along the way Bahar Ahmadifard takes us by the hand and will explain how she gets acquainted with the small institution, how she as a writer and photography critique got herself familiar with the Parking Video Archive and Moving Dust, a traveling video program touring in different cities Tehran, Shiraz, Kerman, Bandar Abbas, and Isfahan, while hearing fragments of the soundtracks of the films and videos in the program.
Besides we enjoy listening to various sound artists and musicians who collaborated with us in the past years. Carefully selected works by Ali Farzadi (Isfahan), Leonie Roessler(The Hague), Rahi Sinaki (Tehran/Vienna) and Kasra Pashaei (Tehran), who were invited to contribute to the podcast. This marks the start of a new chapter for Dustopedia.
On Radio Dust, we also listen to readings of a text by Nebras Hoveizavi on Dust in Mysticism, commissioned by Obieg Magazine – Poland.
For more information please look at
https://obieg.u-jazdowski.pl/en/numery/kurz/dustopedia
https://obieg.u-jazdowski.pl/en/numery/kurz/moving-dust
https://obieg.u-jazdowski.pl/en/numery/kurz/dust-in-mysticism
Rhodiola:
https://rhodiola.ae/Radio-Shows
New Media Society in Collaboration with the Architecture and Urbanism Circle at TMoCA Presents:
A talk by Curator Michel Dewilde: “Art and Public Space in a Liquid World “
Jan 31, 2017, 5 pm
Interpreter: Amirali Ghasemi
Cinematheque of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art– Tehran
Since the sixties, contemporary artists have had different motivations to venture into the realm of public space and its inhabitants.The Belgian art historian and curator Michel Dewilde curated several exhibitions in the public domain since the nineties.
In his lecture Art and Public Space in a Liquid World, he addresses a range of questions such as: What can be the role of the artist and his artwork in a 21st century where the communal, open space, is getting more and more privatized? What about the interaction with the members of the public, patrons, local government and institutions? How far should public art works produce their own space and subsequently generate its own public? What is private and public?
Drawing on the writings of scientists and thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and others, Dewilde advocates exhibitions in the public realm which strive towards the setting up of forms of local or even personal connections. In this expanding, flattened horizontal liquid world, artists and cultural workers should strive towards the creations of vertical nodes, verticals points of entry and encounters, places where art and its curators can start to cure again. In the lecture, Dewilde will refer to a number of exhibitions which influenced him, and takes examples from exhibitions he curated such as: Side Tracks (1996) with artists such as Marina Abramovic, Chohreh Feyzdjou or Berlinde de Bruyckere, ‘Artline 5’ (Borken, Germany, 2001) with Bizhan Bassiri, Alicia Framis, Anya Gallaccio, Manfred Pernice, ‘Passages’(Brussels, 2013) with Peter Buggenhout, Emilio Lopez-Menchero and Neda Razavipour, the new ‘Triennials for art and architecture’ (2015-2018) with Song Dong, Atelier Bow Wow, Studio Mumbai, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian.
