Davood Madadpoor. From what you said, Radicals Between Trees and Dicks is the result of several years of research you’ve done into the queer cruising culture in Azerbaijan, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. You visited around thirty different cruising spots—parks, saunas, and other hidden places. There, you spoke with people who shared their stories and experiences. You also included your memories in the work. All of this came together in a video composed of eleven acts. In it, you blended these personal stories with the broader social and political pressures that queer people face in these regions. Five dancers were cast to choreograph and perform the collected stories, giving them physical and emotional presence. In addition, you referred to Azerbaijan’s cinematic history.Can you walk us through these acts, your process, and how they are interconnected?

Agil Abdullayev. All eleven acts in the film form a constellation rather than a sequence, not built to be read linearly, but to be felt relationally. Each act arises from a mode of queer endurance—looking, waiting, touching, withdrawing, fleeing—not as narrative events but as psychic and bodily states that recur across space and time. They do not resolve; more likely, they resurface.

The research spanned over thirty cruising locations across Azerbaijan, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, including public toilets, abandoned parks, shadowed forest paths, and saunas reclaimed in silence. I approached these sites as unstable topographies—sometimes haunted, sometimes overflowing, and always in flux. At times, some existed only as memories, carried in the voices of those who once moved through them. These sites became intervals—temporal clearings opened by desire and risk, emerging only under certain conditions: dusk, solitude, heat, fear, and proximity.

I tried to gather at least one audio interview from each location, but this wasn’t always possible. Sometimes it was unsafe, or people declined to participate. In those cases, what remained were my own observations. These were fragments written down hours later, gestures remembered by the body rather than captured by voice. Absence became a kind of data, a material in its own right—charged, resistant, opaque. These were developed into performances. 

These acts are what I consider emotional architectures—ways people relate through repetition, breath, and rhythm. The film unfolds choreographically. Acts collapse, recur, and reconfigure. This structure mirrors the affective rhythm of cruising, a practice of seeking connection that rarely moves in a straight line. Cruising is elliptical: it loops, waits, and doubles back. This is why the film carries that same rhythm—in structure and breath.

In performance, working with queer performers was essential. They did not need personal histories of cruising in parks or clubs, such as LAB in Berlin. Instead, they needed to understand the subtleties of queer language and hold ambiguity without explanation. I wasn’t interested in literal reenactment. We also used micro-gestures from interviews—shifting a jacket, turning a face, or slowing a step. These gestures carried memory and passed from one body to another, like oral traditions. Dancers became vessels, interpreting emotional charge instead of narrative content.

Each act is shaped around a particular weight or frequency. Act I is not an introduction, but a disorientation—an invitation to dwell inside uncertainty. Later acts hold heavier political tension, but never address it directly. Even the most charged sequences maintain some opacity. The acts are linked by tonality, not plot—like movements in a score. In that sense, the film is more a fugue than a documentary. Its structure allows memory, fear, shame, and desire to blend into each other without the need for resolution.

I didn’t want to map cruising spaces in a documentary sense. I wasn’t interested in cartography, but in conditions. What must be true—socially, politically, sensorially—for these spaces to appear? In this way, Radicals Between Trees and Dicks becomes less a film about cruising, and more a film that cruises. It drifts between textures of vulnerability and resistance. The film touches histories both personal and collective, and always remains slightly out of reach.

Davood. You work across film, photography, and painting, each with its strength—film’s temporal flow, photography’s stillness, and painting’s material presence. How do you use the special qualities of each to explore queer life, and how do they come together or clash in your work?

Agil. I don’t start with a medium. Instead, I begin with a question that slowly inhabits many forms. Painting, photography, performance, sculptural installation, and moving images don’t work in isolation for me. They are part of one ongoing body, each leaking into the others. A painted surface might still come from a video still. A filmic movement might mirror absence within a photograph. These references build until boundaries between media collapse.

Art is the only language I know that allows me to be heard without needing to fully explain myself. It’s how I make sense of what cannot always be said. Each medium in my practice is a way to approach silence. Photography’s stillness allows contemplation of erasure. Painting’s texture gives weight to absence. Film—being durational—allows the effect to unfold in fragments. This intermediality is essential to my practice. It reflects how queer life itself cannot be contained in a single form or narrative thread.

Davood. Your films begin in personal histories—childhood memories, diary entries—and grow into shared archives where individual and collective memories mix. In which moments or through which methods do you choose to blur the line between your own story and the broader queer archive? How does this merging open up new possibilities to build shared narratives? And how do you decide when to protect, distort, or reveal identities—especially in politically repressive situations?

Agil. The line between my memory and the collected archive is not something I intentionally blur. It becomes porous through how I approach people and experiences in research. I don’t separate what I encounter in the field from what I carry within myself. Whether it’s a conversation with someone in a park at dusk, or the feeling of a site lingering after I’ve left, these experiences inhabit me. I approach subjects—people, gestures, or landscapes—as I would experience in my own life.

Everything we experience leaves a trace within us. Research does too. What I hear, what I witness, and what I’m trusted with all become part of the emotional architecture of the work. The boundary between personal and collective dissolves—not because I force it to, but because they are already intertwined. Memory is relational. It’s built in proximity to others. The personal and collective don’t sit side by side; they fold into each other.

In this fold, I begin to build a shared archive. It’s not one that aims for historical completeness, but one that makes room for contradiction, opacity, and feeling. The stories shared with me are not simply data or testimony. They become part of a wider, unstable terrain of queer survival.

In politically hostile contexts, especially in post-Soviet regions, visibility is always a double-edged sword. It can empower, but also expose someone to danger, violence, or erasure. Many people I spoke with requested that they not be filmed or that their voices be excluded from the recording. I respect these boundaries completely. That’s why I invite performers to embody anonymized gestures. Through this process, performers also become part of the story. Many voices in the film are re-voiced by actors or digitally altered. These distortions are not about concealment. They are acts of care, preserving intimacy without reducing it to something easily consumed.

Davood. I read that you, by revisiting “queer intimacy, self-reflection, anger, fear, and belonging,” aim to create a space of “hyper‑possibility” as sites where queer narratives aren’t handed down but actively fractured and remade. Can you elaborate on this, and how do you conceive the capacity of these hyper‑possibility spaces?

Agil. “Hyper-possibility” refers to how queer life must imagine itself beyond current conditions. In cruising, you enter a space that exists within, but also against, the city. It is part of the city, but not sanctioned. That duality creates a special imaginative force. The abandoned train yard in the final act of Radicals in Between Trees and Dicks is a scene of possibility. Will someone arrive? Will something happen? Or will you just wait and walk? That uncertainty is political because it refuses finality. In doing so, it becomes a form of hyper-possibility. It’s not just a lack of resolution. It is an opening to what hasn’t yet been imagined. This uncertainty is generative. It is full of potential for new configurations of desire, presence, and encounter.

Davood. It seems these spaces don’t deliver a single, coherent queer story but rather assemble fragmented moments that break conventional gazes and invite open room for surprise—rebellious joy, playful rage, and shared care. How does the fragmentary nature of your “hyper‑possibility” spaces generate new relational modes and emotional registers instead of simply transmitting pre‑formed queer narratives?

Agil. Fragmentation allows for multiple entry points. The film doesn’t provide a single story of queer life in the region. That would be a kind of violence. Instead, it accumulates impressions—like sweat in a shirt or the echo of footsteps in a dark corridor. 

It is a method. It is an ethic. It allows me to sidestep dominant narrative structures and instead invite the viewer into a space of emotional attunement. Fragments ask you to assemble, but they never promise completion. They invite a different kind of attention—a more sensitive, intuitive relation to the work.

Davood. You draw on Soviet‑era Azerbaijani film aesthetics—not out of nostalgia but as raw material to be re‑coded into a queer archive through appropriation and formal intervention. What specific cinematic techniques or aesthetic codes from that film history did you appropriate, and how do they function within your work to challenge or subvert their original ideological purposes?

Agil. I delved into Azerbaijani cinema from the 1960s and 1970s a long time ago, while working on another film, If the Sun Sees You, which took its point of departure from Nizami’s Seven Beauties. I was drawn to these films immediately—they seemed to speak a visual and emotional language that resonated deeply with my own practice. Those films didn’t fully serve the state narrative, but also didn’t entirely rupture from it. Beneath their ambiguity and melancholic masculinity, I sensed an artistic tension that mirrored the kind of emotional undercurrents I often explore in my work.

These films, shaped by censorship, ideology, and scarcity, developed a language that feels ripe for reinterpretation. Their theatrical blocking, static frames, and muted tones were survival strategies. I don’t approach them with nostalgia, but as unresolved codes—forms waiting to be queered. In my own work, I retain this grammar but shift its gravity—from nationalism to queer affect, from collective ideals to emotional vulnerability.

Performance becomes a site for re-reading. I also turn to Azerbaijani folk dance, not as heritage but as choreography of gender. Male dancers were trained to embody dignity, strength, and restraint—gestures tied to patriarchy and militarized masculinity. In my work, I fragment and distort these movements: a lifted chest collapses, a sharp turn slows to hesitation. What happens when such gestures are re-inhabited by queer bodies, when pride softens into tenderness?

What emerges is a counter-folklore—a choreography of deviation. The body ceases to serve the state and instead holds memory, desire, and loss. Dance becomes a way to deconstruct and reinhabit the past—not as ideology, but as emotion.

Davood. The 2022 Russian mobilization and the resulting militarized surveillance disrupted cruising circuits, turning encounters into acts of resistance. How did the war‑driven rapture of cruising under Putin’s mobilization reshape the political dimension of those spaces in your film, and in what ways do you see cruising operating as a tool of queer dissent?

Agil. The political dimension of cruising shifted dramatically over the course of the research—almost in parallel with the transformation of my own role within these spaces. When I began the project in May 2019, the terrain already felt unstable, but it was still navigable. Over the following years, so many ruptures occurred: the outbreak of COVID-19 and global lockdowns, the closure of queer-friendly bars and community venues, the hardening of borders between Azerbaijan and its neighboring countries, the growing criminalization of LGBTQ+ life across the post-Soviet region, and a general intensification of surveillance and isolation. These events changed the world around me—so organically, they changed my relationship with work.

Even my own body changed during this time. During lockdown, I gained significant weight, and that physical transformation also altered my position within cruising culture. I became less of a participant and more of a witness. This shift was deeply personal, but also methodological: it marked a move from being inside the scene to observing how scenes themselves dissolve and reassemble. The project became less about the act of cruising and more about its disappearance—its conditions, its ghosts.

But it was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022—and especially the first military mobilization in September—that fundamentally altered the political atmosphere in the region. I was in Tbilisi when the mobilization was announced, and suddenly the city became a refuge for queer people fleeing conscription in Russia. The air was thick with fear, uncertainty, and exhaustion. People didn’t know if they would be forced back, if new borders would close overnight, or if the war would expand. The sense of instability was no longer abstract—it was in every conversation, every gaze exchanged in the dark.

Within this context, cruising shifted from being a covert act of desire to a precarious form of resistance. Meeting someone in a park or a forest clearing, in a time when borders were closing and bodies were being conscripted into violence, became a radical insistence on relationality. Cruising asserted: I still exist outside the machine of war. I still desire. I still refuse to be folded into the logic of nationalism or death.

In the film, this transformation is not dramatized; instead, it is felt. The latter acts become quieter, darker, and more anxious. Encounters are more fleeting, gestures more cautious. I didn’t feel it was ethical—or even possible—to record the rawness of these moments directly. Instead, I turned toward abstraction: sound becomes muffled, bodies are partially obscured, and choreography replaces representation. The uncertainty of the moment demanded a new form of listening, a new ethics of presence.

This period reshaped not only the content of the work but my entire methodology. It forced me to slow down, to accept disappearance as part of the process. It taught me that some stories can’t be captured, only felt around the edges. Cruising, in this sense, operates not just as a form of queer intimacy, but as a fugitive politics—one that resists state violence not through confrontation, but through persistence, through softness, through remaining unpredictable and ungovernable.

The post On Radicals Between Trees and Dicks—Agil Abdullayev in conversation with Davood Madadpoor appeared first on Sumac Space.

İpek Çınar: At first glance, our practices and outcomes may appear quite different, but I sense they stem from similar concerns and struggles. That makes me especially curious about this exchange. So let me start directly: How would you describe what you do at the intersection of art, participation, and politics?

Reyhaneh Mirjahani: I would describe my art practice primarily as a mode of critical investigation. Rather than positioning art as an end in itself, I approach it as a methodological and epistemological tool—one that enables me to examine and intervene in a socio-political situation, an issue, or a tension. Ideally, it serves as a mode of inquiry capable of activating forms of knowledge production that are embodied, situated, and relational.

I rarely begin with art as such. I tend to start with a question or conflict, using art to probe, study, re-read, and reframe a situation. I am especially curious about the entanglements between power, counter-narratives, ethics, and lived experience. I focus on how these forces shape one another and structure the conditions for participation, responsibility, or agency. Initially, my interest was grounded in theoretical frameworks. Over time, I have become more drawn to the capacity of artistic practice to generate alternative research modes. These modes resist abstraction and instead foreground affect, contingency, and embodied experience.

I try to approach art not only as a representation, but as a speculative and experimental space. Here, dominant logics can be discussed, redefined, or reimagined. Art enables the exploration of new ways of relating, the rehearsal of ethical positions, and the co-creation of shared meaning. I am interested in how these spaces can offer conditions for critical reflection that go beyond cognition. They are also embodied and effective. This brings the possibility of more nuanced and plural understandings of participation, responsibility, and the political. 

İpek: Your earlier works address identity and belonging through guest/host and self/other tensions, but later take on a more transnational, relational focus. Looking back, what questions or dilemmas prompted this shift in direction for you? Was it a gradual evolution or a response to particular challenges?

Reyhaneh: We grow up in systems that are keen to define our lived experiences through dichotomies. It is a way to simplify situations, and we are taught to think in the same terms. Over the years, I have shifted my attention toward what lies between these categories. I want to grasp the complexity of relationships and to resist static interpretations of events. 

This has transformed my practice. My work is no longer primarily about my own identity or position. Instead, I focus on how, as subjects, we navigate the contexts and systems in which we live. Dialogue and participation become essential. They create opportunities to explore and understand the diverse, dynamic experiences of others. At the same time, they help reveal the politics that shape participation and dialogue. 

İpek: From what you’ve described, art for you seems to exist as both something projected into the future (the not yet) and as a process that unfolds. In your participatory works, many elements are involved: planning, realization, documentation, participant input, unexpected encounters, and the tensions of the moment. All of these meet in a speculative space. With so many variables, how do you see your role in this process? For example, how do you position yourself in the room?

Reyhaneh: I would describe my role in participatory projects as a facilitator. During the preparation and development phases, I established a framework with specific elements and cues. These questions or concerns are what I want to explore with participants. These elements act as subtle guideposts, not strict instructions.

Once the work begins, I try to step back and leave space for participants to interpret and respond on their own terms. I consider this openness essential. It allows the unexpected to emerge in both content and group dynamics. Sometimes I intervene during the activation phase, usually by asking a question or subtly shifting the group’s attention. My aim is to stay responsive rather than directive. I try to inhabit a space between author and participant. This lets me guide without closing possibilities, and to unfold relationally, shaped by the moment—whether social, political, or interpersonal.

But this brings me to a key question about your own practice: How do you define your role within the Orta Okul project that you initiate? In your view, how does your positioning affect dynamics, openness, and the potential for unexpected outcomes?

İpek: Initiate is the correct word. I usually describe myself not as an artist, but as an initiator. Even this role can influence a project’s dynamics more than I expect or want to admit. My solution is to carefully specify which groups I work with and spend more time with them. I dedicate time to understanding the community’s dynamics and learning about them. Whenever possible, I exchange ideas with them before the project begins. This helps my vision align with the community’s reality and wishes.

This approach involves compromises. Instead of working in galleries, museums, or staging public interventions, I often work in spaces where the community feels safer. Sometimes, I commit to longer-term collaborations. For example, in a recent project with Orta Okul, we spent several months meeting with the community every Friday. Sometimes, we did nothing more than ask, How do you perceive what we are doing together? Ultimately, we did not produce exactly what we had planned. But the process taught us about participation, empowerment, and building connections. Some women began referring to it as our project rather than your project. A few even wanted to take the initiative to continue it independently. This was an unexpected, yet deeply valuable, outcome.

I would like to specifically focus on your upcoming work, An Experiment on Agency #8, which will be part of Acts of Conflations and is the reason we met. This project continues a series that has already engaged diverse geographies, including Latvia, the Netherlands, Italy, and Sweden. Could you discuss the overall framework of this work and how you have adapted it to various contexts? 

Reyhaneh: This work is designed to create a space where friction, disagreement, and discussion are not only possible but necessary. I have noticed that conversations around agency often get trapped in rigid dichotomies: either one has agency or one does not. In An Experiment on Agency, I seek to disrupt these binaries by foregrounding contexts in which agency is ambiguous, unstable, or constantly shifting. The work invites participants to explore subjective understandings of power and responsibility, rooted in lived experience rather than abstract definitions.

While I actively shape each version of the work based on its context, the project itself also evolves. The context not only informs the realization of the work, but also transforms it. Each iteration responds to dilemmas specific to the setting. These may relate to geography, sociopolitical conditions, or the group’s composition. During the activation phase, participants further shape the work, often steering discussions toward their own concerns and group dynamics. For example, in Riga, one participant group consisted of humanities secondary school teachers. In the Netherlands, it was a group of artists and researchers in socially oriented and academic practices. Each setting brought new questions: What kind of language emerges around the concept of agency? How do we discuss responsibility in a group of nations in conflict? What does it mean to claim neutrality? What happens when the agency shows up as refusal, withdrawal, or silence rather than action? And how do aesthetics operate in this participatory format?

İpek: Sharing agency is as challenging and risky as political, often feeling like the subject investigates you as much as you investigate it. Why is it so central to the series?

Reyhaneh: At first, I approached the agency as something granted, and I was interested in how we could exercise it. Later, during research phases, I began to question that premise entirely. Some scholars argue that agency can be imposed, involuntary, or even illusory. This was a turning point for me—not only for the project, but also for my own understanding of the concept. From there, the focus shifted toward examining different forms of agency and the structures that either limit or enable it, as well as the dilemmas and liminal spaces in between that we need to navigate.

I personally had the privilege of growing up around some activists and civic actors in my hometown of Tehran. That environment initiated many questions about our agency, responsibility, and ethics, situated between an authoritarian regime and imperial powers. For me, these questions are inseparable from my lived experience, regardless of where I am or the privileges I hold. I believe that engaging with this subject reveals much about our own subjective positions, standing in contrast to purely empirical research on the topic and challenging the binary frameworks through which the world is so often understood.

İpek: And what will you be exploring specifically in the Berlin context?

Reyhaneh: In Berlin, I am particularly interested in continuing this investigation at a time when violence is intensifying. Specifically, in the context of the ongoing genocidal acts and the immense human suffering of the civilian population in Gaza, the response we’ve seen in Germany—mirroring similar trends in some other Western countries—reveals a growing repression of protest and political movements. Within this climate, a central question emerges: how can we hold space for conflict without collapsing into consensus? And how can we meaningfully engage with the notion of agency when speaking out becomes a risk, and visibility itself can be weaponized?

I am not sure that it will open up new ways in a radical sense, but it will emphasize the already existing resources in our society: the capacity to share and to listen. I do not mean this passively; rather, it is a deliberate engagement with doubt, dilemmas, and insecurity, creating a space where these tensions can be acknowledged and discussed. The aim is not necessarily to provide answers, but to trace and understand the different structures at play in shaping experience and agency. This is what I hope to realize in the exhibition.

At the same time, I also want to acknowledge my own doubts. To what extent can conversation alone generate alternative approaches to entrenched situations? How much space can we truly give to antagonism in a context where we are still confronting the very real legacies of oppression and violence? Under what conditions, and when, are we allowed to engage in agonism, and when must we prioritize care, listening, or safety? 

I’m curious about your perspective on working in Berlin today. How do the specific conditions, tensions, and opportunities here shape the way you think about agency in your own projects? And how does this affect your work with Orta Okul or similar participatory initiatives?

İpek: What you say is extremely important and a pressing issue in Germany, one that we all face in different ways. We are confronted both with the complicity of the country we live in regarding genocide and with the hypocrisy of institutions that have benefited from post-migrant, anti-colonial, and feminist discourse, which remain silent and try to silence us. Yet we remain here, because there is no other place to go.

At Orta Okul, we have dedicated our first three years to topics related to this: Urgency (2024), Community (2025), and Resilience (2026). Our aim is to strengthen collective bonds and allocate the limited resources we or our fellows have. I find both ease and political engagement in empowering individuals, using the methods you mentioned: care, listening, and creating safer spaces, especially for those in more difficult positions. It may sound simple, but after seeing how institutions complicate these topics, I believe we need a bit of simplicity and directness. And more spaces to discuss. Perhaps for this reason, we need An Experiment on Agency now more than ever.

Reyhaneh Mirjahani is an artist working at the intersection of visual art, curating, artistic research, organizing, and publishing, focusing on participatory art. She uses collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to create dialogic spaces exploring agency, participation, counter-narratives, and spatial politics. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University, and has completed the postmaster programs Commissioning and Curating Contemporary Public Art at HDK-Valand and CuratorLab at Konstfack.

Ipek Çınar is an artist and researcher working predominantly with participatory and socially engaged art practices. She uses play, joy, and unexpected encounters as means of expression. She studied Political Science at METU Ankara and Art in Context at UdK Berlin, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Alongside her artistic production, she also works in the field of anti-discrimination and social justice. İpek Çınar loves the word “Orta” (Middle): She is co-editor of Orta Format and is a co-founder of Orta Okul.

The post Holding the Dilemma, Sitting with the Question—Reyhaneh Mirjahani in conversation with Ipek Çınar appeared first on Sumac Space.

Mojtaba Amini explores the dual roles of artists as creators and social commentators, highlighting the tension between artistic freedom and societal pressures and the influence of political power on creative expression. His work is closely connected to his personal experiences and the violent histories of the materials he uses, which serve as metaphors for larger societal issues. Amini also critiques the ignorance and absence of serious curators in Iran’s art scene, pointing out that the dominance of galleries and commercial interests stifles true artistic expression and hinders significant artistic movements.

Davood Madadpoor: One of the concerns that have recently occupied my mind, and I would like to know your perspective on this, is the concept of being an artist. We who work and live in the Middle East, focusing on its social and political geography, might see our artistic activities take on a different hue, whether for me as a curator or you as an artist. Considering that this region is constantly undergoing social and political changes, how has your relationship with art evolved over time?

Mojtaba Amini: An artist’s beliefs and ideologies compel them to interpret and analyze political and social conditions. They then try to align these beliefs with their academic background, compare them with the realities of society, and ultimately intervene in their path forward. These alignments and contradictions can lead to growth, change, and evolution in the art and the artist’s character. Changes in society stem from the policies of power, and the citizen-artist, depending on their relationship with power, can present a form of art that constantly needs to evolve.

Pariya Ferdos[se]: Is this structural belonging a necessity? And if belonging to this structure limits the audience, can the artist find a way to overcome this limitation in presenting their work, both in the manner of presentation and in the scope of the audience?

Mojtaba: It would be better to answer this series of questions with Mikhail Bakhtin’s view on the artist, the audience, the artwork, and society. Bakhtin believes that Art is inherently and intrinsically social; when the external social environment influences art from the outside, it encounters an immediate and internal resonance within it. These two factors (art and society) are in no way alien forces that influence each other: the structure of one influences the structure of the other…Even that internal part of the artist that manifests in their work still has a social root in the artist’s subconscious, and the political or social situation of the environment provokes the artist to react in various ways. There will be no specific obligation, but there will be resistance from the artist regarding the form of presentation and the content of their works concerning environmental influences. Suppose the social conditions impact the artist as an individual in society, resulting in an artistic work and the construction of meaning. In that case, the reception of this meaning is completed in the same context where the work is created. The effort to transcend these limitations is somewhat subject to becoming fashionable.

Davood: By accepting the artist’s role, do you think we are caught up in a system that forces us to engage with it and consequently question and address it? Do you think the artist now, beyond the “traditional” role of being an artist, also assumes other roles?

Mojtaba: I think artists oscillate between the role they choose for themselves and their assigned role. Where society gives them meaning and credibility, compulsion will also be present in their work.

Davood: So, if I understand correctly, we should pause again to discuss the freedom and limitations of artists, correct? And have you, as an artist, accepted this compulsion from society? Should we call it compulsion, or perhaps a term like responsibility would better capture the sense of obligation?

Mojtaba: Artists are free, and no one has the right to tell them what to do or not do. However, when the artist, as Albert Camus says, becomes temporarily famous and derives their credibility from society and the people, they are compelled to stand with the people.

Pariya: Accepting that the artist, in your view, should stand with the people, to what extent is this possible, and if achieved, how impactful, inspirational, and effective can it be? Should the artist feel obligated to be influential?

Mojtaba: A famous artist with social capital can be influential to some extent by raising awareness and intervening in society.

Davood: Can you explain the nature and manner of these influences? Do these influences follow a particular direction?

Mojtaba: I think one of the best examples of intervention in power and the social influence of an Iranian artist is Mohammad Reza Shajarian due to his correct stance concerning the political-social events of recent years, which led to the banning of his works from state television and, more specifically, the removal of Rabbana from Iranian radio and television. His act raised many questions among the people, especially the religious part; it’s an example of the most accurate form of awareness-raising by a socially influential and well-known artist.

Pariya: Given that we have discussed the influence of political and social context and the dominant structure on the artist, how do you think, besides these factors, the intrinsic nature of the artist as a human being and their lived experience (in the form of psyche and body) impact the creation of their work?

Mojtaba: Any form of personalization in the artist’s work and the creation of art is something in continuity with others and resembles others. I mean that the creation of artistic work takes place in dialogue with others and under the influence of others in society. The “self” of the artist is not an independent existential entity; moreover, the artistic work is produced within a medium with history and past influences.

Pariya: In addition to the role and presence of the artist as a socio-political and artistic figure whose content is derived from the environment, in your work, the nature of the material and its becoming (in interaction with the environment and other materials) is evident. Where does this perspective and attention to the importance of the passage of time and the subjective nature of the material come from?

Mojtaba: I have previously answered this question elsewhere, in the book “It Transpired” Material and language have a nearly equal serious presence in my work. The material in my work has two aspects: personal and impersonal. Skin, fat, soap, and wool have a connection to my past and childhood as someone who lived in a rural farming family and witnessed the violence inflicted on animals, all of which these materials in my work are exactly “the remnants of violence” from the bodies of animals. In conjunction with the linguistic aspect of my work, which is a form of “language of violence” for me, they create that critical and socio-political meaning I intend from art. The other part of it is impersonal materials, similar to oil and tar, which are directly influenced by our political and social life, and it’s clear that no further explanation is needed here.

Pariya: And continuing, is it only the artist in this geography who should be expressive, or should other artistic roles like gallery owners, curators, dealers, etc., also be directly involved and function as an influential group or puzzle? How should this juxtaposition be?

Mojtaba: Certainly, all these elements that you mentioned are important and influential because for the three aspects of the artwork, the artist, and the audience to function correctly, the presence of all of them is necessary. However, in Iran, this coexistence does not work properly. There is no serious concept of a curator because galleries’ absolute dominance and the market’s logic do not feel the need for a curator’s presence. As a result, the artist has also lost their role and importance in this dominance. This is why we do not witness serious and specific art trends, and artists mostly produce commodities for this economic cycle.

Davood: In your opinion, what is the solution to break this flawed cycle? How can we create real convergence among artists, curators, gallery owners, and other factors to witness the formation of serious and meaningful trends?

Mojtaba: Breaking this cycle depends on the existence of independent and governmental institutions that support artists who are not inclined towards the market’s demands and tastes, as well as the existence of experimental, artist-run, and collaborative spaces.

Paria: In this process and interaction between local and global art, where do you see Iranian art in the big picture of global art?

Mojtaba: Due to the significant dispersion of the Iranian population worldwide, what is seen and presented as Iranian art is mostly within the realm of economy and market, and among this migrant population, there is nothing beyond that.

Sumac Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. If you would like to share a collaboration proposal, please feel free to write us. We warmly invite you to follow us on Instagram and to subscribe to our newsletter and stay connected.

The post Artist’s Dilemma: Authorship, Power, and Social Responsibility—Mojtaba Amini in conversation with Pariya Ferdos[se] and Davood Madadpoor appeared first on Sumac Space.

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Mitra Soltani shares how her experiences with instability, lack of agency, and being a woman have shaped her projects. The conversation explores the evolving roles of the artist, the unique imprints they leave, and the intersection of gender, embodiment, gesture, and indigenous context in her work. The conversation not only addresses the duties and limitations of artists in society but also emphasizes the crucial role of the artist in shaping societal narratives, the power of juxtaposition, and the role of art professionals in bridging the local and global art scenes.

Davood Madadpoor: I want to start the conversation with a general question about being an artist. The concept of being an artist differs in local and international contexts. Coming from the Middle East (with a focus on its social and political geography), we may add a different flavor to the concept of being an artist through our artistic activities. Considering living in a region constantly undergoing social and political changes, how has your relationship with art evolved?

Mitra Soltani: In recent projects like Showing Transparency and A Number of Monuments, my direct experience with the subject has been central to my work. The daily experience of insecurity and lack of any form of stability is a state that deprives the human/artist of any sense of “agency.” For me, art’s function is a way to fight or resist the feeling of being objectified in such a situation. My work involves collecting archives, working with low-value or ephemeral materials, and exploring the lifestyle and art of local tribes and nomads.

Davood: Mitra, you made an interesting point! How can we reconcile the contradiction between the lack of agency for the artist and using artistic methods as a form of struggle?

Mitra: The example is local women’s way of life and art, inspiring this project. These women live in challenging conditions with countless restrictions imposed by society, family, and nature. However, all these limitations do not result in them being passive; instead, they impact their surroundings by employing art and rituals bit by bit. This impact deepens and spreads to the point where it even infiltrates their society’s most challenging and male-dominated structures. For me, defining agency is something like this.

Davood: By accepting the artist’s role, do you think we are engaged in a particular situation and system that compels us to interact with it, thus questioning and addressing it? Do you think the artist now has other roles beyond the “traditional” role of being an artist?

Mitra: I find this question challenging. I don’t fully understand the concept of an artist’s “traditional” role. Perhaps it means that the role of art in its traditional form was static and has changed over time. However, I’m afraid I have to disagree with this idea. Every example that comes to mind, whether historical or traditional, shows the artist constantly asking questions, challenging assumptions, and transforming. Therefore, the artist has not assumed a new role; what has changed is the way of thinking and expression, which has evolved with the times.

Regarding the first part of the question, since I consider freedom the most essential characteristic of art, I don’t think the artist is “compelled” in any field. However, I feel trapped in a system and am trying to find a way out.

Pariya Ferdosse: Given that you mentioned being trapped in a system, I will rephrase Davood’s first question differently: is this contextual attachment a necessity? And if this attachment to the context limits the audience, can the artist overcome this limitation in presenting their works? (Both in presentation and the audience)

Mitra: For me, the work was created within the context of my living environment, making it impossible to think or develop detachedly. Essentially, this compulsion and a sense of helplessness shaped the idea of the work. Regarding the audience limitation, it is natural for each work to have its audience. I have created many projects in nature, Indigenous environments, and public and urban spaces that have attracted a wide range of audiences, and works like this project probably have a more limited audience. In other words, I am not particularly insistent that all my works have the same or a broad audience.

Pariya: In this context, how does the intrinsic nature of the artist as a human being and their lived experience (in the form of a posture – both mental and physical) impact the production of the work, considering that some of your works remind me of Hannah Wilke and particularly Ana Mendieta? (I ask this question in line with your discussion about the lifestyle of nomadic women and how gender and embodiment have entered your methodology and working style.)

Mitra: It is hard to imagine an artist who can think about art or create something detached from their lived experience. The only question is how tangible this impact is. Essentially, this work and most of my projects are based on my lived experience in a native and ritualistic culture, both in subject matter and working method. I am inclined toward a form of conceptual art that relates to ritualistic actions, literature and nature are other essential components of my artistic practice. All these elements directly arise from the life of my mind and body in such a context. A specific example is works entirely based on ritualistic behaviour, and ritual cannot be understood from the outside. This topic underscores the importance of the body and gender in my works, as the relationship between body and gender and their dialogue with nature gives rise to rituals.

Davood: What differentiates an artist who feels responsible towards society from groups like politicians or social scientists who seek to imagine and create a new future?

Mitra: It is more logical to think about the similarities rather than the differences because this distinction is fundamental. An artist uses their freedom, sensitivity, and creativity. They can internalize issues and present intangible aspects. They move independently of the boundaries and limits of any discipline and thus deal not with explaining issues but with perceiving disasters or ideal situations. For example, my experience with some artworks with socio-political concerns (amid the constant flow of world news and information, which quickly trivializes every important matter) has been like a pause or break. This pause suggests different ways of seeing and thinking and keeps the hope for change alive through creativity.

Pariya: Assuming that you believe the artist should stand by the people, how feasible is this, and if achieved, how impactful, inspiring, and functional is it? Should the artists consider themselves obligated to be impactful?

Mitra: I believe the artist should not necessarily stand by the people, and I can’t define a “should” for the artist. I only know that art is closer to freedom than anything else, or at least it should be. Therefore, in a dictatorial society, the side of freedom is likely the opposite of power in most cases.

Regarding obligation, as I said, I cannot impose a duty on the artist; I think more about the commitment to art itself. I am still determining its functionality, which significantly depends on the social conditions in which we are active. Still, regarding inspiration, I agree that artistic endeavor is fundamentally inspiring, and we can think about its quantity and quality.

Pariya: In this context, is it only the artist who should be expressive, or do other artistic roles like gallery owners, curators, dealers, etc., also have a direct impact and function as a group or puzzle? How do you see this juxtaposition?

Mitra: Any form of expression or impact in art results from a set of choices. Naturally, in these choices, other players in the art field, such as gallery owners, curators, dealers, critics, etc., play an important role. As we have often seen, artists with prominent discourses have been marginalized while less significant productions have been highlighted. In the case of my projects, this juxtaposition has usually not been very successful because in such projects, the roles of others, including gallery owners, curators, etc., are more significant in presenting the work, and many challenges make them less inclined towards such projects.

Pariya: In this process and the interaction between local and global art, where do you see modern (contemporary) Iranian art in the big picture of global art?

Mitra: I am not very optimistic about works that have a closer connection to indigenous contexts. I only know a few successful examples of such art. By success, I mean being recognized in the global picture, as you mentioned. Because I think the global/Western view of other societies is still negligent and colonial in that they always pay attention to easily accessible and exotic images and ideas, not those that require a deeper understanding.

Mitra Soltani is an interdisciplinary artist interested in the relationship between literature, culture, and everyday life. She always uses objects that reflect the history and identity of the culture. Her work seeks new experiences of dealing with material and concept by exploring indigenous art practices and literature. She received a bachelor’s degree in painting from Shahed University of Tehran and a master’s degree in graphics from Tehran University of Art. Soltani has participated in more than thirty group exhibitions and art festivals and biennials and has made a number of projects in urban spaces and nature. Instagram

Pariya Fedros[se] is a curator, researcher, writer, and architect working on intersectional curatorial methodology and practices based on comparative methods, discourses, and texts. She started her career in art as an art director at age 26. After being cofounder and art director of two galleries, and because of her background in studying computer science, architecture, and philosophy (especially Eastern), she decided to extend her experiences to interdisciplinary research/text–oriented curating and architectural projects. She curated and designed Tehran’s Trilogy in three different exhibitions in Tehran’s central and ancient neighborhood (2017-2018). She was a researcher in the project exhibited in CAAM [Contemporary Art Museum in the Canary Islands]. Named Human All Too Human based on the ideas of the Iranian philosopher Suhrawardi (2018-2021). She curated an exhibition called Melencolia I with nine artists from four countries following comparative methodology and bridging art history inspiration, cinema, and psychology; this project took nine months (2022-2023). She was one of the writers in the book Rethinking the Contemporary Art of Iran by Hamid Keshmirshekan (2023). Recently, she’s been working on curational and publishing projects on different topics, such as Iranian literature, mysticism and immigration.

Sumac Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. If you would like to share a collaboration proposal, please feel free to write us. We warmly invite you to follow us on Instagram and to subscribe to our newsletter and stay connected.

عاملیت، فعل (یا رویه‌های) روزمره به مثابه مقامتی در برابر حذف شدن

میترا سلطانی چگونگی شکل‌گیری پروژه‌هایش براساس تجربیات خود  از بی‌ثباتی، فقدان عاملیت و زن بودن را به اشتراک می گذارد. این گفتگو به بررسی نقش‌های رو به تکامل هنرمند، اثر منحصر به فردی که از خود به جا می‌گذارند، و تلاقی جنسیت، بدنمندی، ژست و بافتار بومی در آثار او می‌پردازد. این گفتگو نه تنها به وظایف و محدودیت‌های هنرمندان در جامعه می‌پردازد، بلکه بر نقش حیاتی هنرمند در شکل‌دهی روایت‌های اجتماعی، قدرت هم‌نشینی و نقش متخصصان هنر در پل زدن میان عرصه‌های هنری محلی و جهانی تأکید می‌کند.

داوود مددپور: می‌خواهم گفتگو را با یک سوال کلی درباره مفهوم هنرمند بودن آغاز کنم. من معتقدم که مفهوم هنرمند بودن در دو بافتار مختلف؛ محلی و بین‌المللی، متفاوت است. ما که از خاورمیانه (با تمرکز بر جغرافیای اجتماعی و سیاسی آن) می‌آییم، ممکن است با فعالیت‌های هنری‌مان رنگ و بویی دیگر به مفهوم هنرمند بدهیم. با توجه به زندگی در این منطقه که دستخوش تغییرات اجتماعی و سیاسی مداوم است، چگونه رابطه‌ی شما با هنر در طول زمان تکامل یافته است؟

میترا سلطانی: در پروژه‌های اخیرم مانند Showing Transparency و A Number of Monuments، تجربه‌ی مستقیم از موضوع کارم بوده است. تجربه‌ی روزمره‌ی ناامنی و فقدان هر شکلی از ثبات، وضعیتی است که انسان/هنرمند را از احساس هر گونه “عاملیت” خالی می‌کند. در حال حاضر، کارکرد هنر برای من راهی برای مبارزه یا مقاومت در برابر احساس شیء شدگی در چنین وضعیتی‌ست که این راه شامل جمع‌آوری آرشیوها، کار با متریال کم‌ارزش یا کم‌دوام و همچنین جستجو در شیوه‌ی زندگی و هنر اقوام و عشایر می‌شود.

داوود: میترا نکته‌ی جالبی را مطرح کردی! به نظرت چگونه می‌توان این تناقض بین تهی بودن از عاملیت هنرمند و بهره‌گیری از شیوه‌ی هنری به عنوان راهی برای مبارزه، را کنار هم قرار داد؟

میترا: مثال‌ش همان شیوه‌ای است که در شکل زندگی و هنر زنان محلی می‌بینم که در این پروژه نیز الهام بخش من بوده است. این زنان بیشتر در شرایطی بسیار دشوار و با محدودیت‌های بی‌شماری از سوی جامعه، خانواده و طبیعت زندگی می‌کنند. اما همه‌ی این محدودیت‌ها باعث نمی‌شود که آن‌ها از عملکرد انفعالی برخوردار شوند، بلکه با به‌کارگیری هنر و آیین‌ ذره‌به‌ذره، تاثیرگذاری بر محیط اطراف خود دارند. این تاثیرگذاری عمیق‌تر می‌شود و به گسترش می‌پیوندد تا جایی که حتی بر سخت‌ترین و مردانه‌ترین ساختارهای جامعه‌شان نیز نفوذ می‌کند. برای من، تعریف عاملیت یک چنین چیزی است.

داوود: با قبول و پذیرش نقش هنرمند، آیا فکر می‌کنید که درگیر یک شرایط و سیستم خاصی شده‌ایم که ما را مجبور به ارتباط با آن و در نتیجه، به پرسش کشیدن و مورد خطاب قرار دادن‌ش می‌کند؟ آیا فکر می‌کنید که هنرمند اکنون خارج از نقش “سنتی” هنرمند بودن، نقش‌های دیگری را نیز بر عهده دارد؟

میترا: خود این سوال به نظرم ایجاد چالش می‌کند. من مفهوم نقش “سنتی” هنرمند بودن را به‌طور کامل درک نمی‌کنم. شاید منظور این باشد که نقش هنر به شکل سنتی‌اش تنها کارکرد استاتیکی داشته باشد و در طول زمان این کارکرد تغییر کرده باشد. اما من با این ایده موافق نیستم. هر مثالی که به ذهنم می‌آید، هرچند ممکن است تاریخی یا حتی سنتی باشد، هنرمند را همواره در حال طرح پرسش، به چالش کشیدن فرضیات و تغییر و تحول می‌بینم. بنابراین، فکر نمی‌کنم که هنرمند اکنون نقش جدیدی پذیرفته باشد؛ آنچه تغییر کرده، شیوه فکر کردن و بیان است که به اقتضای زمان تغییر کرده است.

درباره بخش اول سوال، از آنجایی‌که مهم‌ترین ویژگی هنر را آزادی می‌دانم، فکر نمی‌کنم که هنرمند در هیچ زمینه‌ای “مجبور” باشد. اما به شخصه، احساس می‌کنم در یک سیستم گیر افتاده‌ام و در حال تلاش برای یافتن راهی به بیرون هستم.

پریا فردوس: با توجه به اینکه از سیستمی نام بردی که در آن گیر افتادی سوال اول داوود را طور دیگری مطرح می کنم؛ آیا این تعلق بافتاری یک امر الزامی است؟ و اگر تعلق به این بافتار، جامعه‌ی مخاطب را محدود کند آیا برای هنرمند راهی وجود دارد که این محدودیت را در ارایه ی آثار خود کنار بزند؟ (چه در ارایه و چه در جامعه‌ی مخاطبان)

میترا: دست کم برای من و در شرایطی که اثر مورد بحث ساخته شده، بله من ناچار بودم و امکان اینکه منفک از بستر زیستم فکر یا خلق کنم را نداشتم . اساسا همین ناچاری و یا احساسی از درماندگی ایده‌ی اثر را شکل داد. در مورد محدودیت مخاطب به نظر من طبیعی است که هر اثر محدوده‌ی مخاطب خود را داشته باشد. من پروژه های زیادی را در طبیعت، محیط های بومی و فضا های عمومی و شهری ساخته‌ام که طیف گسترده‌ای از مخاطب را در بر داشته است و آثاری شبیه این پروژه، که احتمالا مخاطب محدودتری دارد. به عبارت دیگر چندان اصراری ندارم همه‌ی آثارم مخاطب یکسان یا گسترده‌ای داشته باشند.

پریا: در این راستا خود ذاتی هنرمند به عنوان یک انسان و حیات زیسته‌اش (در قالب یک ژست -روان و تن-) چه تاثیری بر تولید اثر دارد با توجه به اینکه برخی از کارهای برای من یادآور هانا ویکله و به خصوص آنا مندیتا است؟ (این سوال را در راستای صحبت خودت در مورد شیوه‌ی زیست زنان عشایر مطرح می‌کنم و اینکه چه‌طور جنسیت و بدنمندی در روشمندی و شیوه‌ی کاری تو ورود کرده است)

میترا: تصورش برای من سخت است که هنرمندی بتواند فارغ از تجربه‌ی زیسته‌اش به هنر فکر کند یا چیزی خلق کند. شاید تنها این مساله باشد که تا چه میزان این تاثیر ملموس است یا نه. اساسا ایده ی این اثر و بیشتر پروژه های من کاملا بر اساس تجربه‌ی زیسته‌ام در یک فرهنگ بومی و آیینی پدید آمده است، چه از نظر موضوع و چه از لحاظ شیوه‌ی کار. من به نوعی از هنر مفهوم گرا که در ارتباط با کنش های آیینی است گرایش دارم و ادبیات و طبیعت دیگر مولفه های مهم در تمرین هنری من هستند. همه این موارد مستقیما از حیات ذهن و جسم من در چنین موقعیتی ناشی میشود. مثال مشخص آن آثاری است که کاملا بر اساس رفتار آیینی شکل میگیرد و آیین مساله ای نیست که بتوان بیرون آن ایستاد و درکش کرد. همین موضوع به اهمیت مسئله تن و جنسیت درآثار من اهمیت می‌دهد چرا که نسبت میان تن و جنسیت و همچنین نوع گفتگوی این دو با طبیعت است که آیین‌ها را پدید می‌آورد.

داوود: از منظر شما چه عامل یا عواملی باعث تفاوت بین یک هنرمندی که احساس مسئولیت در قبال جامعه می‌کند با گروهی مانند سیاستمداران یا دانشمندان علوم اجتماعی که در پی تصور کردن و ساختن آینده‌ای جدید هستند، وجود دارد؟

میترا: به نظرم حتی منطقی‌تر است که به شباهت‌ها فکر کنیم تا تفاوت‌ها، به این دلیل که این تفاوت بسیار اساسی است. هنرمند آزادی، حساسیت و خلاقیتش را به کار می‌گیرد. او می‌تواند مسائل را درونی کند و جوانب غیر قابل لمس را به نمایش بگذارد. او مستقل از حدود و مرزهای هر دیسیپلینی حرکت می‌کند و از این رو نه به تشریح مسائل بلکه به ادراک فاجعه یا موقعیت ایده‌آل می‌پردازد. برای مثال، تجربه‌ی خودم از بعضی آثار هنری با دغدغه‌ی سیاسی-اجتماعی (در حرکت مدام میان اخبار و اطلاعات جهان امروز؛ موقعیتی که هر مهمی را به سرعت به امری پیش‌پا افتاده فرو می‌کاهد.) شبیه به یک وقفه یا مکث بوده است؛ وقفه‌ای که شیوه‌های دیگر دیدن و اندیشیدن را پیشنهاد می‌دهد و با کمک به خلاقیت، امید به تغییر را زنده نگه می‌دارد.

پریا: با پذیرش اینکه از نظر تو هنرمند بایستی سمت مردم بایستد تا چقدر این امر شدنی‌ست و در صورت تحقق چقدر تاثیر گذار، الهام‌بخش و کارکردی است؟ و آیا هنرمند بایستی خود را موظف به تاثیرگذار بودن بداند؟

میترا: نظر من الزاما این نیست که هنرمند باید سمت مردم بایستد و اساسا نمی توانم بایدی برای هنرمند تعریف کنم. من تنها می‌دانم که هنر بیش از هر چیز به آزادی نزدیک است یا بهتر است باشد. بنابراین در جامعه‌ای دیکتاتوری احتمالا در بیشتر موارد سمت آزادی سمت مخالف قدرت است.

در مورد موظف بودن هم چنان که گفتم نمی‌توانم وظیفه ای برای هنرمند قائل باشم، در مورد خودم می‌توانم بگویم بیشتر به تعهد نسبت به خود هنر می‌اندیشم. در باره‌ی کارکردی بودن آن مطمئن نیستم و خیلی بستگی به شرایط اجتماعی که در آن فعال هستیم دارد اما درباره‌ی الهام بخش بودن، موافقم که تلاش هنری اساسا الهام‌بخش است و می‌توان درباره‌ی کمیت و کیفیت آن فکر کرد.

پریا: و در ادامه آیا تنها هنرمند هست که در این جغرافیا باید بیانگر باشد یا باقی سمت‌های هنری مانند گالری‌دار، کیوریتور، دیلر و … هم تاثیرگذاری مستقیم و به شکل یک گروه و یا پازل را دارند؟ یا با تعبیری این کنارهم‌قرارگیری (juxtaposition) به نظرت چگونه باید باشد؟

میترا: فکر می‌کنم به هر شکلی از بیان‌گری یا تاثیرگذاری در هنر فکر کنیم حاصل مجموعه‌ای از انتخاب‌هاست. در این انتخاب‌ها طبیعتا بازیگران دیگر عرصه هنر همچون گالری‌دار، کیوریتور، دیلر، منتقد و.. نقش مهمی دارند. چنانکه بارها دیده‌ایم هنرمندانی با گفتمان برجسته به حاشیه رفته و تولیداتی نه چندان مهم در معرض توجه قرار گرفته‌اند. در مورد پروژه‌های من معمولا این کنار هم قرارگیری چندان موفق نبوده است، زیرا در چنین پروژه‌هایی هم نقش‌های دیگر از جمله گالری‌دار، کیوریتور و.. اهمیت بیشتر در ارائه اثر دارند و هم چالش‌های بسیاری وجود دارد که آنان را کمتر به چنین پروژه‌هایی متمایل می‌کند.

پریا: در این روند و تعامل هنر محلی و جهانی، هنر مدرن (امروز) ایران را کجای مختصات تصویر بزرگ هنر جهانی (big picture) می‌بینی؟

میترا: در مورد آثاری که به زمینه‌های بومی تعلق بیشتری دارند، من خیلی خوشبین نیستم. یعنی چندان نمونه‌های موفقی از نوع هنر را نمی‌شناسم. موفقیت منظور به رسمیت شناخته شدن به قول شما در مختصات تصویر جهانی. چرا که به نظرم نگاه جهانی/غربی به جوامع دیگر سهل‌انگارانه و همچنان استعماری است. به این معنا که همواره به تصاویر و ایده‌هایی سهل‌الوصول و اگزوتیک توجه نشان می‌دهند نه ایده‌هایی که به شناخت عمیق‌تر وابسته است.

The post Agency and Quotidian Practices as Resistance Against Omission—Mitra Soltani in conversation with Pariya Ferdos[se] and Davood Madadpoor appeared first on Sumac Space.

Milad Odabaei: Parham, the images of Asymmetrical Authority are at once familiar and strange to the imagination imprinted with the political history of contemporary Iran. They recall the 1979 Revolution that deposed the Pahlavi monarchy and brought about the Islamic Republic as well as the eight years of war with Iraq (1980-88) that immediately followed. But the colors, folds, shapes, and cuts that give form to your photographs make the familiar a bit strange. Can you tell us about the images?

Parham Taghioff: As you know I was born just a couple of months before the Revolution. Like yours, my childhood memories are of a highly uncertain and extreme ideological atmosphere of the post-revolutionary decade during the war. During those years I developed a game with my grandfather. I would wait for him to read the newspaper, which I remember him doing with an extremely worrisome and disheartened look on his face. We would then play with the paper, fold it, cut it, and make it into different shapes and forms. This was the origin of Asymmetrical Authority, and really, all of my experimentations with history and image. In my game, the documented history of the earlier generations’ struggles and achievements, became the raw material for creation. Today, over three decades later, I have started a new game with the similar images of the past but, this time, as an author.

In the last few years many books of documentary photographs have been published in Iran. Books, for example, of the archival news images of the Revolution or the Iran-Iraq War. A noteworthy example is a book modeled on the 2002 volume “Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering, and Hope” published by Phaidon (London and New York). The history of these books goes back to the publications of bilingual, English and Persian, books of documentary images of the war. Three decades later, these books still serve various ideological purposes and reproduce orthodox narratives of our lived history of the Revolution and the war. They emphasize, for example, the popularity of the Revolution or that the war was internationally imposed on Iran and the Iranian response was a “holy defense.” [The war with Iraq is often referred to as jang-e tahmili (“the imposed war”), and defa-e moqadas (“the holly defense”) in Iran.]

The sources of my images are drawn from such books and similar archives of Iranian documentary and news photography. In our time when an academic and critical interpretation of photography is not entirely accessible to the general public, rapid reproduction and circulation of images provide answers to difficult historical predicaments. Images, along with other forms of easily accessible information, function as an authoritative source and dispel other forms of interpretations. In Asymmetrical Authority, I have reproduced historical images but have tried to empty them of their signification and excavate other possible interpretations.

Milad: In what you are saying I hear echoes of not only critical reflection on art and modern reproducibility, but also post-revolutionary Iranian debate on national historiography. Asymmetrical Authority, it seems to me, breaks with the doxas of both leftist and Islamic narratives of the Islam and the Revolution and poses national (meli) history and historiography as an unresolved problematic in the form of a question. Can you speak about the capacity of photography to confront a political world saturated with ideology and myth? How do you mobilize photography for critical historiographic exploration?

Parham: Transforming our understanding of time, the camera has the capacity to challenge our understanding of the past. Through reproduction, as Walter Benjamin notes, photography undermines the authority of the original and the sanctity of the author. Popularization of photography has enabled everyone to confront the world through the mechanical or digital eyes of the camera, and to tie together being and time in a click. Citizen journalists, with the capacity of both capturing and circulating “the news,” have challenged the monopoly of traditional news makers as well as the national and international jurisdictions of traditional journalism. Today, news media often follows the images that appear on social media by lay image-makers.

At the same time, however, the sheer volume of the images in our daily lives diminishes our capacity to discern the historicity of the past. Everyone has acquired the power to establish the meaning of images and by extension, the meaning of history. Digital photography challenges traditional regimes of citationality, facticity, and authority and instead, emphasizes discursivity. Today, more than ever, the meaning and significance of images are established in the context of their circulation and reception. The truth of images, in other words, lies beyond their genealogy in a particular time and place. The question is how we locate images in historical narratives and memories, and how do we draw on living images to tie together the past, the present, and the future. In her book On Photography, Susan Sontag emphasizes an important point: “Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.”

Milad: The tension between traditional and professional forms of authority on the one hand, and democratic authority as well as populist dissolution of authority on the other, is central here. Can you speak about the title of the collection, Asymmetrical Authority?

Parham: When I started to work on this collection I came across an article by Lutz Koepnick titled “Photographs and Memories”. I found a deep resonance between what I was doing to the images of the past in the studio and Koepnick’s attention to time and history in photography. Koepnick draws on Sontag and her Wittgensteinian approach to photography to move beyond a purely representational analysis of photography. He writes:

The most essential question is therefore not how different technological inventions cause different representations of temporality, but how we place certain images—digital or analog—in larger narratives of history and memory; how we make use of both their formal inventory and exhibition in order to connect different pasts and presents; how we rely on different strategies of naming, description and inscription, of discursive en-framing, in order to infuse them with temporal texture or pass them off as souvenirs of frozen time; and last but not least, how we engage older myths of reference, objectivity, and truth in order to define the relationships between image-makers, photographic subjects, and viewers as relationships of either asymmetrical authority or mutual recognition. No image, whether computer-processed or not, has an existence or memory of its own. It is what we do with them that decides over their life and afterlife. It is how we situate them against the backdrop of other narratives, discourses, images, and strategies of representation that enables them to speak in various ways about the past and its bearing on the present. [Citation: Koepnick, Lutz. “Photographs and Memories.” South Central Review 21.1 (Spring 2004): 94-129.]

My photographic practice tries to confront the force of technological representation and reproduction and explore possibilities of creative intervention.

Milad: Central to questioning of authority is a kind of distancing. Asymmetric Authority, and your previous collections that it builds upon, all perform a form of photographic distancing.  Let’s talk about your last collection, Hands On Hands Off, which was produced in 2014 at the height of negotiations between Iran and the G5+1 over Iran’s nuclear program, you produced images of hands and gestures of politicians who were negotiating the fate of the deal and with it, supposedly our collective existence. Can you address your use of distancing, zooming in and out, and what it achieves technically and otherwise?

Parham: During the negotiations between Iran and the G5+1 we were experiencing a very complex situation. Any exchange between the two sides had a direct effect on our lives, not simply socioeconomically, in terms of easing of economic sanctions, but also politically. The international negotiations were deeply tied to highly divisive domestic political contestations. The images of negotiations saturated the Iranian and international news. For the first time after the Revolution, the foreign ministers of Iran and the United States were part of the same conversations, along with other G5 leaders and Germany. In these images the gestures of politicians had attracted my attention. Under the attentive gaze of the camera, the bodily gestures of politicians provided the disempowered viewer with important information. Using a macro lens, I focused on the news media images of the negotiations and reproduced the gestures of politicians as they appeared on the camera monitor. Printing the result in large frames, I then challenged the viewer ability to discern the representational content of the image in the exhibition. In close proximity, the viewer would only be able to see the LEDs lighting behind the image. He or she would have to step back to be able to see the image. My aim was to create a theatre of my own, and through techniques of separation, combination, magnification and rearrangement, bring to the viewer’s awareness the work of power in news media and in the mediation of our lives.

How do you think of your images as working within and against a national imagination? How do you think the reception of your photographic response to the Revolution and the war is generationally mediated?

We all have different imagination of our respective national identities. But are all born into particular histories. We might think that what has happened in the past is in the past and unchangeable. But every historical examination shows of a different image of the past, and as a result, the past, the present, and the future are reconfigured anew. Iranian national ideology is largely steeped in myth and ideology. In my opinion, we urgently need to pose new questions of our pasts and develop our engagement with the images of our history toward critical cultural and historical studies.

Indeed, Asymmetrical Authority has received different responses from our generation and those before and after us. But history, perhaps in a Hegelian sense, is the synthesis of different and at times conflicting interpretations and pursuits and irreducible to any one account or project. 

Milad Odabaei is a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. His research brings together anthropological and critical methods for the study of modern Iran.

The post History and Image as National Memory Beyond Nationalism—Parham Taghioff in Conversation with Milad Odabaei appeared first on Sumac Space.

[Scroll down for the Italian Version]

In the Greek language, dialogue comes from διά-through and λογος-speech, it is a conversation, a movement through an open space between distant dimensions of feeling, thinking, acting, where everything could happen. We developed another space and dynamic seeking our own format: a trialogue, a meeting of us three, who were in a continuous conversation without a specific goal known beforehand. Holding space and time together in regular online convenings, we tested how we can take and give space to each other in exchange free from assigned roles, expectations and structures. 

Through the following map, we, Anahita Razmi (artist), Jaroslava Tomanová (curator/researcher) and Fabrizio Ajello (writer/artist) set up a confrontation, triangulating our research and processes of thought and artistic experiences about stereotypes, deconstruction, decolonisation, translation and the figure of a Trickster, completed by a series of stringent questions on the topics addressed. Including links to resources such as articles and books, the presented map can be seen as a curated library visualising the relations between topics we discussed. We hope it will be a starting point for further growth, an ever-changing creature of thought which can hopefully take the form of a tetralogue, pentalogue, and so on.

Link to the Map

The following questions can be understood as flexible nodes prompting a discussion when needed. They do not determine any structure or form; they can be left alone and invited back when we forage for thoughts and intuitions together. 

• What relations do we see between practices of deconstruction and decolonisation today? What possibilities does the notion of deconstruction hold regarding present-day cultural stereotypes? 

• How do sites of power (institutional, economic, academic…) operate and choose today?

• What are figures that can propose alternatives and subvert systems of representation and power?

• The Meme? The Trickster? The Fool? The Fake Account?

• Trickster as an alter-ego: how can she confuse, destabilise, shake the ground of white privilege and Western modern, patriarchal gaze?

• How can appropriation be deployed to dismantle cultural stereotypes and ideological constructs?

• What relationships exist between tradition, translation and originality in contemporary art and aesthetic languages?

• Can irony form a kind of ‘critical intimacy’? (see Spivak on map)

• Is cynicism/nihilism the opposite of ‘critical intimacy’?

• What is a misunderstanding? 

• What does “lost in translation” mean? How can accidental slippages of one’s unconscious bias reveal an ideological grip?

• What happens when grammar, the system of rules of one language, is applied in another language? 

• Can it tell a story of past trauma? Can it give a testimony of a colonised mind?

Link to the Map

Fabrizio Ajello graduated from the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy in Palermo with a thesis on Contemporary Art History.
In the past, he has actively collaborated with the magazines Music Line and Succoacido.net. Since 2005 he has been working on the public art project, Progetto Isole. In 2008, together with the artist Christian Costa, he founded the public art project Spazi Docili, based in Florence, which in recent years has produced explorations of the territory, interventions, workshops and lectures in public and private institutions, exhibitions and artistic residencies.
He has also exhibited in Italian and international galleries and museums and participated in various events such as: Berlin Biennale 7, Break 2.4 Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Synthetic Zero at BronxArtSpace in New York, Moving Sculpture In The Public Realm in Cardiff, Hosted in Athens in Athens, The Entropy of Art in Wroclaw, Poland. He teaches Literature at the Liceo Artistico di Porta Romana in Florence.

Anahita Razmi studied Media Art and Sculpture at the Bauhaus-University Weimar and the Pratt Institute New York before studying Fine Arts at the State Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart under Rainer Ganahl and Christian Jankowski.
Working with installation, moving image and performance, her practice is exploring contextual and geographical shifts – with a focus on shifts between an ‘East’ and a ‘West’. Using her own Iranian-German heritage as a reference, Razmi’s works are testing grounds for possibilities of import/export, hybrid identities and in the constructions and ambiguities of cultural representation.

Jaroslava Tomanová is a researcher and a writer currently based in Kassel, Germany. Alongside ongoing voluntary and informal art-related activities, her professional background is a combination of working in the visual arts, contemporary dance and performance, academic research and writing. In the past she worked as Curatorial Assistant at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) and as International Collaborations Coordinator at Tanec Praha. Her commitment to art and politics of solidarity, equality and justice drives her motivation to develop curatorial research, writing and practice alongside an overarching long-term research interest in the connection between language and power. Her university education has primarily focused on the relation between the arts and the state, and her PhD research at the University of Leeds is a critical study of neoliberal cultural policy discourse. As a writer and art critic she has contributed with reviews and essays to Corridor8, This Is Tomorrow and Freedom News.

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Frames Cracked by Lines of Doubt–Un Trilogo

Anahita Razmi / Jaroslava Tomanová / Fabrizio Ajello

Nella lingua greca, dialogo viene da διά-attraverso e λογος-parola/pensiero, è una conversazione, un movimento attraverso uno spazio aperto tra differenti dimensioni di sentire, pensare, agire, dove tutto può accadere. Cercando un format adeguato, abbiamo sviluppato un’altra tipologia di spazio e un’altra dinamica di confronto: un trialogo, un incontro a tre,  una conversazione continua senza un obiettivo specifico predeterminato. Dialogando e lavorando insieme attraverso spazio e tempo in regolari sessioni online, abbiamo testato come sia possibile condividere ed collaborare insieme in uno scambio libero da ruoli assegnati, aspettative e strutture. 

Attraverso la seguente mappa, noi, Anahita Razmi (artista), Jaroslava Tomanová (curatrice/ricercatrice) e Fabrizio Ajello (scrittore/artista) abbiamo impostato un confronto, triangolando le nostre ricerche e i processi di pensiero ed esperienze artistiche su temi quali: stereotipi, decostruzione, decolonizzazione, traduzione e la figura del Trickster, il tutto corredato da una serie di domande stringenti sui temi trattati. Includendo link a risorse come articoli e libri, la mappa presentata può essere vista come una biblioteca che mostra in un unica visione le relazioni tra gli argomenti trattati. Questo progetto vuole essere così un punto di partenza per un’ulteriore crescita, una creatura di pensiero in continua evoluzione che presto prenderà la forma di un tetralogo, pentalogo, e così via.

Link alla Mappa

La mappa presentata serve come pietra angolare della nostra conversazione in evoluzione e continuerà a cambiare durante il processo collaborativo. Se vuoi unirti ai nostri incontri liberi, irregolari, informali e non moderati che ruotano liberamente intorno alle domande proposte, invia una richiesta di modifica della mappa o mettiti in contatto via email: editorial [at] sumac [dot] space.

Le seguenti domande possono essere intese come nodi flessibili, tese a stimolare una discussione e un confronto in fieri. Non determinano o precludono alcuna struttura o forma; possono essere affrontate singolarmente, o utilizzate come punto di partenza per focalizzare e processare insieme pensieri e intuizioni.

• Quali relazioni vediamo oggi tra le pratiche di decostruzione e decolonizzazione? Quali possibilità ha la nozione di decostruzione rispetto agli stereotipi culturali attuali? 
  
  
• Come operano e scelgono oggi i luoghi del potere (istituzionale, economico, accademico…)?
  
  
• Quali sono le figure che possono proporre alternative e sovvertire i sistemi di rappresentazione e di potere?
  
  
• Il Meme? Il Trickster? Il Matto? Il Fake Account?
  
  
• Trickster come alter-ego: questa “figura” è in grado di confondere, destabilizzare, scuotere il terreno del privilegio bianco e dello sguardo occidentale moderno e patriarcale?
  
  
• Come può l’appropriazione essere impiegata per smantellare stereotipi culturali e costrutti ideologici?
  
  
• Quali relazioni esistono tra tradizione, traduzione e originalità nell’arte contemporanea e nei linguaggi estetici?
  
  
• L’ironia può formare una sorta di “intimità critica”? (vedi Spivak sulla mappa)
  
• Il cinismo/nichilismo è l’opposto dell'”intimità critica”?
  
  
• Cos’è un malinteso? 
  
  
• Cosa significa “lost in translation”? Come possono gli slittamenti accidentali del proprio pregiudizio inconscio rivelare una forzatura ideologica?
  
  
• Cosa succede quando la grammatica, il sistema di regole di una lingua, viene applicata in un’altra lingua? 
  
  
• Questo fenomeno può raccontare la storia di un trauma passato? Può dare una testimonianza di una mente colonizzata?
  

Link alla Mappa

The post Frames Cracked by Lines of Doubt—A Trialogue appeared first on Sumac Space.

In this exchange between Davood Madadpoor, Katharina Ehrl, and Ali Eslami, Eslami delves into his ongoing project “False Mirror” and its implications for understanding the intersection of virtual reality, identity, memory, and artistic practice. He reflects on how “False Mirror” has evolved from a speculative future to a complex parallel world, intricately intertwined with his daily experiences. Through meticulous attention to detail and the exploration of memory within the virtual realm, Eslami challenges conventional notions of truth and expands the possibilities of artistic expression.

Davood Madadpoor / Katharina Ehrl: I’m assuming you’re thinking a lot about futures by engaging on such a lengthy project, False Mirror, which began in 2017. As an extension of that, I’m saying you’re thinking about every detail of this future. As you mentioned, the primary motivation for this project is wondering if humans would ever be supposed to live in a virtual world and how we would do so. What about this future intrigues you? What is it about this that compels you to devote all of your time to it?

Ali Eslami: I think that’s how I saw it initially, as a pre-construction of a future that could happen, but the more I spent time building it, the more it became intertwined with the present and my daily experiences in life. So it’s kind of hard to think of False Mirror as a future world at the moment, but for me, it implies a space that contains its temporality in which I respond to it by contributing my time to this parallel world.

The concept of expansion, engineering of a new reality, this whole process has remained the core of my practice for a long time. The more I tend to model every detail and function within this world, the more complex and sometimes out of control it gets. It has become a sandbox reality that I can rebuild, grow, modify, archive, and play with all at once.

To a great extent, it’s similar to a kid in a playground playing with modular toys (Lego); the tools at hand and building blocks can be reshaped through imagination. They can be torn apart, destroyed, rebuilt, and expanded.

As a practice, this engineering of other worlds brings a lot of exciting methods and reflections to the reality of life itself. So it functions almost like a feedback loop between the real and unreal. And I think that’s the main reason it remains an exciting parallel world to work on and approach as a process that’s always ongoing rather than a project with an end goal.

Besides, it’s pretty amazing and fun at times to see different aspects of the world that become incompatible and cause various bugs and glitches, which can be quite inspiring when it happens! That’s something I’ve learned by making this world: that it always has certain unstable corners/moments in which things fall apart and get loose, and I find it quite fascinating and surprising when it happens.

For example, two years ago, I encountered this glitch (because of an error in my programming) that would load different spaces all together overlapping each other (instead of unloading the previous ones), resulting in multiplied spaces that in VR was a magnificent experience in itself!

DM / KE: In False Mirror, not only is the world expanding, but the body is also evolving, acquiring skills, becoming more capable, and becoming more alienated. Do you believe that this new identity—or as we’ll refer to it, this new virtual identity—is needed to escape reality? Can’t we just be ourselves in this fictitious world?

AE: I think the whole idea of the body, at least in my work, is an element that gets explored in relation to its virtual surroundings. So these bodies we talk about have the role of a pawn. They are vessels that allow anyone to embody and navigate the new world through them. Almost like what a car is for us. We drive the car, and as driver, we become one with the vehicle itself.

When I put the VR headset on and start an experience in False Mirror through a modular posthumous body, I am indeed still my (real) self, but the mechanics of my body has been replaced by a new form. I’m curious how these virtual bodies that we take over can merge with those who inhabit them. Identity becomes a question mark when anyone can embody a character in False Mirror.

This aspect of virtual identities sometimes gets overblown in the mainstream digital culture, where it’s mainly being advertised as a space to ‘freely be yourself’. However, this doesn’t take into account how much of your new body, which represents you in these worlds, shapes who you are and, to some extent, blurs with your own identity.

DM / KE: The future is derived from what was and what is. How are memories connected to these alternate realities you create? Or what role do they play?

AE: The fact is that the project’s been growing since 2017. I have always had a tendency to record and archive as much as I can because having an archive of memories of a world in expansion is a fantastic tool for thinking and reflecting back on quite deep levels and layers of the ground reality that is being shaped around you.

In fact, in this video performance I’m showing at The Tellers, I explore the memory within the context of False Mirror. The sandbox notion of this world allows us to rethink what memory can be like. For instance, throughout my walkthrough video I reveal some memories of things that never happened or have a chance of happening in the future!

Another way of playing with it is that memories in this example are pinned to virtual zones within spaces, and they can only be seen/revisited by navigating to those zones. This makes me think about what a world might look like if we could only access our memories based on our location in the world. In that world, would we keep moving from place to place to access more memories or the other way around?

No matter how ridiculous it might sound, one can speculate about it in a virtual world like False Mirror.

DM / KE: You stated that reality becomes more fictional as your artistic practice develops; I’m curious as to where you wake up in the morning. In the False Mirror or your Amsterdam apartment?

AE: I think the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is itself a human construct. What we call non-fiction or ground truth is based on a lot of things we take for granted.

The same concept applies to a virtual world. The more time spent, the more presence, makes it more accurate, and of course it becomes more real to someone like me—who spent lots of time creating and, at the same time, experiencing it—than to a person who’s only spent 1 hour in there.

Another way to look at it is by comparison with how social media feels like a world of its own. When I scroll through Instagram while I’m on a train ride, I get sucked completely into its world and, whether I like it or not, my brain functions and even feels things differently in those states. And in effect, we constantly shift between these micro realities in our routine daily life.

DM / KE: How do you perceive False Mirror’s position as an artwork? I came to this question through the intersection of several concepts; in one sense, if you have a title such as Virtual Reality Developer, it implies that others might wonder whether False Mirror is a game. Additionally, during our discussions about putting together the exhibition The Tellers, we came across the need for additional technology and skills to show how virtual reality works, even though I was doubtful that we have the necessary infrastructure to do so.

AE: I think the process of world-building in general, whatever the medium, is an artistic practice. It requires the involvement of so many different disciplines such as architecture, game design, sound, system design, cybernetics, and so forth. As a result, all these come together and merge with the power of imagination. 

But speaking of media—in my case VR as an emerging technology—I’m aware of how demanding presentation of the work can be technically. This makes the presentation of the work to a large extent inaccessible. And that’s what I found challenging in my artistic practice. And in response, I realized that my outcomes/results don’t have to stay in the VR headset waiting to be experienced. My source of work remains in VR, but the outcome can become manifest in different media such as live performance in video format, text, films, or even a physical installation.

Of course, the final experience of the work itself is radically different when it’s being watched instead of experiencing hands-on VR. But at the same time, there are things that one can express in a video format that are not possible in VR, and I try to respond to these constraints in a way that, as far as possible, doesn’t compromise the core conceptual intentions within the work.

DM / KE: During our conversation, you said that you’re shifting to narrative video. You mentioned trying to deal with the untranslatability of various aspects of reality when attempting to incorporate it into a False Mirror world, both technically and emotionally. Could you elaborate on this and discuss your new approach?

AE: As I said, the core of my practice remains in VR (where the world is being built). But video, which is a new field for me, opens up a lot of great potential for storytelling and narrative, which I can’t express otherwise.

The notion of editing and how you can play with time fragments is almost inaccessible in VR. In a VR experience, everything happens in real-time and moment to moment. In a video, temporality is more liquid and can be shaped to tell a broader narrative. On the other hand, I’ve also been working with VR for seven years already and I feel this shift can be quite refreshing and there are a lot of amazing things to learn that I can grow further with. Meanwhile, making a physical installation that carries the video work is another thing I’m exploring that adds a new dimension to the creative process. Some aspects of the narrative and world-building can be maintained in the real world or emphasized using tangible physical objects that respond to the overarching narrative of the film.

Ali Eslami is an artist and engineer from Iran based in Amsterdam who has been active and experimenting with virtual reality since 2014. His work involves long-term research projects that build up and grow over time through speculations and world-building by carefully observing the nature of reality, the human condition, and constructs that are taken for granted, and trying to push it further to extreme or twisted thresholds.
An obsession with cybernetics deriving from his engineering background leads to creating worlds in aspects of both form and function. These experiences manifest as realities that blur fictional and non-fictional narratives, striving to articulate possible futures while questioning the restraints of space, time, and body.
In 2016, his VR project won the IDFA DocLab Award for Best Immersive non-fiction and in 2020 the Golden Calf for Best interactive at the Nederlands Film Festival (Nerd_Funk). Aside he is co-curator at STRP Festival and programme advisor at IDFA Doclab.

Sumac Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. If you would like to share a collaboration proposal, please feel free to write us. We warmly invite you to follow us on Instagram and to subscribe to our newsletter and stay connected.

The post On the Creation of Virtual Spaces with their own Temporality–Ali Eslami in conversation with Katharina Ehrl and Davood Madadpoor appeared first on Sumac Space.

I’d like to start by asking you to reminisce a bit. I think it’s a good way to begin the conversation about your work since it is so strongly revolving around memory. Can you describe the context in which you started making Fragments? What inspired you or moved you in this direction?

Restrictions and enthusiasm. The idea of the Fragments series was initiated after I made a short film in 2012. I was eager to continue filmmaking, yet I was struggling with time because I have two kids. After my second child was born, I couldn’t allocate personal time to long-term projects and I couldn’t maintain contact with other artists. Despite everything, I decided to embark on this journey but with one condition: not to put myself under stress or impose restrictions. That meant I could not get a hold of special equipment, nor could I commit to teamwork with a crew. All I had was my mobile phone. It has a camera and that was all I needed. I took the first video of this series while I was strolling with my daughter around our neighborhood in Amsterdam. It was autumn and the weather was a bit gloomy but inspiring nonetheless. The whole process is about placing myself and then the audience in an uncertain abstract state, something between delusion, haste, and uneasiness.

What were the incentives and the challenges in the process of making this series of short DIY films?

I was always interested in cinema and filmmaking but it is not easy to make a film all on your own. I had the chance to make a short film with the help of a professional crew here in the Netherlands and Iran, and one animation with the collaboration of some talented artists, but other than that, I was doing everything on my own – script, shooting, editing – when I made a few short documentary films. It might sound difficult but I realized I prefer to work this way which, I have to admit, does limit my options. You don’t have access to other people’s talent and expertise. But as I usually don’t follow a specific, direct plan, it would be difficult to ask someone else to join while I am on a personal journey and the road or the path is not clear to me. Working alone has its limitations but this strategy maintains the private nature of the work I’m trying to create.

Blending different media formats has always been very appealing to me, so this time around, I decided to make a collage with different video pieces under one principle: not to generate a rational idea but to be spontaneous and instinctive. When I shoot, and later while editing, there is no rationale throughout the process; I don’t tend to come up with a hidden meaning for every single shot. I am just relying on uncertain feelings and interpretations. The most gratifying part is editing; I usually have ten to fifteen small video pieces, and then I choose the order and speed in which they will appear. Another motivating part is adding sound, which, I believe, is not interfering with your feelings as obviously and directly as music does, but it adds something very subtle. That is how it all started. The desire for making visual narratives made me use my mobile phone as a tool.

In these videos, you point your iPhone camera at your surroundings, at your everyday, but you edit the recordings in a way that estranges reality and invites introspection and psychoanalytic interpretation. It’s a highly subjective perspective that gives off a sense of detachment or even dissociation. Can you explain what this approach means to you? 

I would like to reach a perceptual situation that I normally don’t deal with in my daily life; that is the game that I started to play with myself since the first Fragment. Every hour of the day we are visually being bombarded, massively, through our phones, computers, TV, and so on. And in the end, our feelings are not always natural, we feel disoriented. So, I thought, what if I manipulate this vast ocean of visuals through my own process and reach a state that is not clear but is also a new sense. Being detached and dissociated is a tactic to reach that state, to start anew, to dig into my perceptions, and reach something different. These visual Fragments are my answers to myself; I would like to place myself in a situation in which I feel something that I don’t experience in the mundane world, something uncanny, a feeling that is not clear and thus has no name. These short fragments are a discovery for me. I wanted to immerse myself in this very new situation of feeling and later digging my soul. What do I feel? Fear? Suspense? What is it? I really like having this kind of conversation with myself and later the viewers.

Fragments are the latest in your line of surrealist work. Why do you favor this type of expression?

My answer is in the challenge of deciphering meaning. Surrealism is not direct. It is not leading the viewer to a ready-made insight; on the contrary, it creates a unique abstract atmosphere. I like this uncertainty and the opportunity to discover, being engaged, and being part of the concept by one’s own interpretation.

The editing in the Fragments series is very dynamic. The sequences are very short, and so is each of the videos. Sometimes they are at a higher-than-normal speed or filmed in movement, while walking or driving. Was it a calculated decision to show things in acceleration?

Yes, these Fragments are trying to visually attack the viewer’s senses. To achieve this I referred to my own personality, I’m always in a rush, can’t focus for a long time but, in the end, I want to gain something. This behavior is being reflected in the way I shoot or edit. I love watching long shots in a film, but when I edit a really short moment, I would like to get a filmic confrontation.

It makes me think of how we experience the world via screens – compressed, accelerated, and overwhelmed. Our reality is non-stop scrolling and browsing. We tend to repackage our lives into  fragments small enough to fit them into the way things are experienced online. Considering the fact that you used an iPhone to film Fragments,  I’m wondering if they were born out of these conditions, of the way we interact with our phones, and the way this shapes our seeing, thinking, and feeling?

That is true. If I didn’t have a smartphone, in my case an iPhone, if I had another kind of camera, the result would have definitely been different. You can have a smartphone everywhere, in any situation, without anyone noticing it, and that ability empowered me to forget any restrictions. The quantity of the films you have increases because you have more space. I have this directive for myself, for the moments that I shoot – the filming shouldn’t go beyond 30 seconds because I know I won’t use longer recordings. And it’s all because we are constantly using our phones, recording anything we find “interesting“ and in the end, we have a pile of junk images and videos that we will forget ever even existed. Smartphones are replacing our minds and eyes. This madness, this chaos, and daily visual bombardment definitely affected me as well, and the Fragments is a result of it. All the quick movements of the camera, the fast speed pieces, are the outcome of the smartphone era and the visual onslaught. I also use social media every day, consequently, that has a big impact on how I see the world and the way I want to create and respond. But if I had a bigger camera, the kind that we used to have while studying documentary filmmaking, the situation would have been different. With those chunky cameras, my movements were limited, I knew I had to be very careful about what I’m filming, not wasting time, and films, and thinking in advance. With a mobile phone, you record a lot and if you don’t like it, you simply delete it at once. It’s kind of like garbage for our eyes and of course minds, but that’s the kind of game I want to play through this visual anarchy.

In this sense, it is somewhat surprising to hear poetry classics in one of your videos; they require a very different sensibility and a slower pace of consumption. What role does poetry play in this video series, and in your art- and filmmaking? 

From the time I started studying art, poetry has been my main source of inspiration. I don’t think I would’ve been able to start this process without being motivated by it. To me, poetry is the goddess of all forms of art. Even though I don’t read poems as much as I used to, I still carry all those poems I read throughout all these years with me. They’ve been carved into my soul. I immediately connect with any content with the slightest reference to poetry – a film, a painting, or anything particular. In that particular video, I was eager to perceive and experiment the existence of poems following the visuals.

Some of the recurring topics in your work are home and yearning for home, displacement and the confusion of being uprooted, family relations, and memories of Tehran. How do you situate Fragments in regards to these topics and your older pieces?

The series I did before, related to the topics mentioned, was started when I moved to the Netherlands. I was living in a small city in the north of the country. It was a sort of a cultural shock to me and I felt very isolated. That’s when I became creative, to express what I was going through. During that time, my main concern was displacement and a form of self-imposed exile. But gradually, I moved on and started to live in the present. Fragments are the result of longing to live in the moment.

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Adela Lovric is a Berlin-based cultural journalist, curator, and producer. Her research focuses on the representations of migration and counter-narratives in film and video art. Currently, she is working as part of several institutional and independent collectives, developing publishing projects, producing events, and experimenting with curatorial strategies.

The post Living in the Moment Post-Cinematically—Parisa Aminolahi in Conversation with Adela Lovric appeared first on Sumac Space.

The New Gods is a mixed media artwork series by Egyptian artist Omar Houssien. Here the ancient deities of Egypt are reinterpreted through the lens of contemporary society, culture, and symbology. We see the god of disorder, Seth, as an Arab Spring protester, the goddess of joy and femininity, Hathor, as a belly dancer, the supreme Ra as an omnipotent president, or Nephthys as an influencer. 

Combining the languages of pop art, advertising, and popular culture, the artist aims to create a critical reflection of contemporary and Egyptian society, as well as to offer a vision that is locally grounded, given that the Egyptian gods have become among the fantasy genre’s stock figures. All artworks were made between 2013 and 2019, during and as a reaction to the Arab Spring. 

Each artwork (Mixed Media, 22×35 cm) is accompanied by a bronze engraved plaque (Faux-bronze, 10×15 cm), with a description of the deity. Similar to museum labels, each plaque had “technical information” such as major cult centers and names in hieroglyphs. The descriptions were written in a way that would accurately describe the deity, but push the viewer to draw parallels to the version represented.

Conveniently, we will take the image of the pyramid to visually convey the power stratification of The New Gods: from the supreme gods representing the state and military (such as Ra), then gods serving the government in various ways (like propaganda and religion), followed by independent shapers of the society (like Horus and Shu), and lastly ones outside the mainstream power.

Curator Srđan Tunić speaks with the artist about each individual god for Sumac Space in order to understand their past and contemporary image.

RA: listen to me, I’ll tell you… (2014)

Srđan Tunić: Ra had supreme power over the existing world. He was also the god of the sun and the kings. According to some interpretations, he was also the king of the gods and the creator of the universe. He was often presented with a falcon’s head, like Horus, with whom he was also paired as the god of the sky.

Omar Houssien: InThe New Gods, he swaps his falcon head for that of an eagle (the official emblem of Egypt and several Middle-Eastern and African countries) appearing as a generic politician, ruler, president, but – he is the face of the government. While he maintains the supreme power, unlike other gods (except for Seshat), the symbol is not on or behind his head, but on the podium, featuring the sun disk and the coiled serpent. With this detail, I wanted to pinpoint that it’s not the focus on the person, but on the position itself, the institution of the government. Ra is whoever stands behind that podium. In nurturing the personality cult, it doesn’t matter who takes the position, it is always the same (Ra).

AMUN: the people and the army are one hand (2013)

Srđan: One of the major deities of ancient Egypt, Amun was omnipresent but invisible, self-created and a creator deity. He was often paired with Ra (as Amun-Ra), making him the ultimate chief deity, and protector of the poor. His headdress has two vertical plumes which he (or it?) kept in your image.

Omar: I see him as the Egyptian military: omnipresent but never in the spotlight, maintaining the monopoly (and consequently the corruption) of power, and creating a model (one is forced) to be associated with as a dark presence looming over every government and president elected by the citizens. Historically, in order to succeed in ruling Egypt, you need somehow to appease the army. On the other side, it can be seen as an open and publicly-owned institution – one of Egypt’s few platforms for success based on meritocracy and social mobility. Military service is mandatory for all Egyptian men and so, the army IS the people. It is also one where the traditional protection of the poor is frequently implied. The military is a synonym for efficiency and is the country’s handyman, doing everything that needs to be done, also setting the desired role model for an average citizen.

OSIRIS: deep state (2014)

Srđan: One of the most important gods for understanding ancient Egypt’s obsession with the afterlife, Osiris was the god of life, death, afterlife, and resurrection, among others. Pharaohs were identifying with him, hoping to join him and become one in death. Traditionally depicted with green skin (color of vegetation and rebirth) and distinctive Atef crown. And this is the only god you depicted from the back, why?

Omar: Purposefully simple and mystical, I see Osiris as the deep state of Egypt. The power behind the power, completely in control yet cloaked from the public. While Ra was the role model during one’s lifetime, Osiris was celebrated in order to provide eternal (after)life. In such a system, where rulers were living for eternity, society doesn’t change and stagnates, being sacrificed to achieve this goal, like in necropolitics.

SOBEK: bow to me (2014)

Srđan: Sobek is the god of the Nile and the army, which had a very fluid and complex nature: at the same time benevolent and dangerous, warding off evil and protecting innocents, sacred and feared (as Sekhmet). Like head and tail on a coin, he embodies an army’s protection and terror aspects. Crocodiles in the Nile river were seen with the same double role: they were killing the pests hurting the crops, but also could eat humans.

Omar: In my interpretation, Sobek kept the crocodile appearance and the double-edged sword role. Posing and vested as a generic religious figure, his clothing combines elements of Christianity (white and purple robe) and eastern religions (halo, red ribbon, solar disk, and other attributes). Fluid and malleable as religion, bringer of peace, and fundamentalist terrorism, Sobek embodies religious authority which is responsible for a variety of conflicts in the Middle East. I think the religious authorities (embodied by the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafist movement) were also pivotal in undermining the Liberal revolutionary movements post-Arab Spring.

BASTET: caTV (2013)

Srđan: The goddess of Lower Egypt and domesticated cats, also a protector against evil spirits and contagious diseases, and one of the defenders of the pharaoh. In the beginning, she appeared more as Sekhmet, the fierce lioness warrior, while later transformed in this more gentle aspect.

Omar: Here she’s presented as a TV anchor, one of the many talking heads on Egyptian Television, playing on the saying that there’s a cat in every home (in ancient times of course), now replaced with a TV. Despite being a protective deity, her role is not naive: representing the media, she is entering people’s private space. In the upper right screen, one can see a baboon (her helpers, also sacred) with a remote controller and inscription Latlata meaning gossip. The bottom left has a few elements, the first being the ka, which stands for one’s spirit or essence after death.

By incorporating it with the image of the media, I’m playing with the idea that the media (or propaganda) is after our soul. The background of the print is made of old state newspapers in Arabic.

ISIS: buy, buy, buy (2013)

Srđan: She was the ideal woman and mother, patron of nature and magic. Isis is personifying the pharaoh’s throne, directly representing the pharaoh’s power. Her headdress is literally the hieroglyph of the throne. She is one of the first gods, coupled with Osiris as her husband, from whom the first stories originated. And here – let’s start with the details, what’s in the background?

Omar: The background of the print semi-transparently shows home delivery and hotline ads from daily newspapers. The goddess herself advertises a product with a twist: while a product could be almost anything, generic and abstract in its shape (detergent? chips? dog food?), framed with a masonic eye and inscription Khara meaning shit. The Eye of Providence (the all-seeing eye of God) has roots in Christianity rather than Egypt and is often associated with freemasonry. That’s why here I wanted to create a visual pun, alluding to conspiracy theories that are often found in adverts and mass communication. This rather negative view of marketing as propaganda is reinforced with my own disillusionment with the advertising world. Additionally, Isis is also the emblem of Banque Misr, Egypt’s first national bank with Egyptian financing, further reinforcing her contemporary symbol for consumerism and propaganda.

THOTH: knowledge is power (2013)

Srđan: The god of wisdom and knowledge, master of physical and divine law, it is said he himself calculated the making of heavens, stars, earth, and everything in them. A creative deity, he is recognized by the sacred ibis and baboon. Also related to magic and death – in the judgment of the dead, he was the one to record the results after measuring one’s sins.

Omar: In the new light, he is seen in an office, working as an analyst, related to the economy and the stock market. While time is money for Horus, knowledge is power for Thoth. Through data, he defines society as a white-collar level bureaucrat. Other potential reading could be surveillance. Whatever the case, he is an essential part of the system.

SESHAT: data harvesting (2019)

Srđan: Overlapping with Thoth, his consort, Seshat is in charge of wisdom, knowledge, and writing. She is the goddess scribe and record keeper, Mistress of the House of Books, in charge of libraries and archives (consequently treasury). She was recording the passage of time, mainly the pharaoh’s time on earth.

Omar: In our contemporary world, she switched to information gathering and data harvesting – the record keeper has moved online. The biggest social media companies are earning money based on collected data from their users, which is the reason why Euro bills are the background image. While everything gets digitized, not all data is important, which makes the record keeping pointless, emphasized by her making grimaces while taking selfies with her smartphone. Record-keeping is also inaccurate (our lives on social media are misrepresentations of our real lives) which is why on her bronze plaque, her name is misspelled. Just like in Ra’s case, her emblem – a stem with star-shaped petals and inverted horns – is not on her head, but on the item. The phone becomes the record keeper and an object of divination.

NEPHTHYS: the lady of the house/influencer (2019)

Srđan: I was trying to find more info on this one, but it’s rather scarce. This goddess was part of the top nine gods, known as the Great Ennead. Her function was the protection of the dead and “the lady of the house/temple”, signifying the pharaoh’s palace and priesthood. Her symbols are a house-shaped hieroglyph and a basket, also her headdress. Compared to some other gods from the pantheon, little is known about her and interpretations are fluid.

Omar: This gap definitely influenced my depiction. Nephthys is an influencer, creating a makeup tutorial. Like Bastet, she has access to other people’s private space and home through technology. Nephtys was heavily present in funerary rites, rituals mourning the dead and is a deity of protection, magic, and embalming.  However, like you mentioned her largest role was that of the “lady of the house”. She is not a housewife, but influences the household, by setting the standards and desired image. The household in this sense is intended to mean the temple, the sacred space. Think about a subtle message: the temple or pharaoh’s palace could be your home.

Her hair, unlike the other gods, is typically Egyptian, curly, and natural, her role hasn’t changed in modern times. In some rural parts of the country, certain mourners are still hired to cry and scream at someone’s funeral, a similar job that existed back in ancient times by the priestesses of Nephthys. The background stripes are metaphorical mummification bands, relating it to her funerary aspect, which could be also linked to the makeup (understood as preservation of course).

HORUS: time is money (2013)

Srđan: One of the oldest worshipped gods from ancient Egypt, he is the god of the sky, war, and hunting. Usually depicted as a falcon or falcon-headed man, he is truly a symbol of majesty and power and served as a role model to the pharaohs. In your interpretation, he looks like a cool businessman, dressed in a smart casual way, looking at his watch, with a solar disk (a precursor of the Christian halo if I may note) above his head. Tell me more about his new image.

Omar: This is actually the first of this series to be produced. Horus is business and time related: time is money, money is business, business is power. He is a desired model of the all-powerful, an image of the entrepreneur. His image is still widely in use in Egypt (for example, EgyptAir’s logo and many businesses around the country). As such, I see him both as a protective deity and a sign of competition, through his ancient hunting role.

ANUBIS: shopping for eternity (2013)

Srđan: Anubis is of the most recognizable Egyptian deities, represented as a black jackal. The black color was associated both with the rotting flesh and the black earth of the Nile valley. He is the god of mummification and underworld, who weighs one’s heart before deciding if one’s spirit (ka) be destroyed or live eternally.

Omar: I depicted him as an elderly-looking shopper, he is an image of materialism, consumerism, and consequently capitalism.

Srđan: My initial interpretation focused on the cart, where most of the conserved products and their packaging could outlive our physical bodies, being fully or semi-artificial. But…

Omar: I’d suggest that the supermarket is related to another transitory and non-place, the tomb and the underworld. Through the process of mummification, people’s organs were preserved, and the burial included material possessions, sometimes even favorite pets and servants, ready to follow their master to the afterlife. I’ve alluded to this with the background, with its thick grainy brushstrokes simulating the earth. This stacking could also relate to the saying that you can’t take it all with you to where you’re going after death…

SHU: busybody (2019)

Srđan: A primordial god, Shu stands for air and wind, but is also “considered to be a cooling, and thus calming, influence, and pacifier”, often metaphorically seen as separating the sky and earth. The ostrich’s feather in him is seen as a symbol of lightness and emptiness.

Omar: In The New Gods, he’s smoking shisha, while in the background are warning messages from tobacco packaging. While his air symbolism is traditionally seen in a rather positive light, the pacifying role has been reverted to a vice. His pose is frequent in the Arab world: as a human CCTV, he’s monitoring others and creating a form of social pressure. After all, Shu has been separating the lover’s Nut, the goddess of the sky, and Geb, the god of the Earth. 

A busybody who knows everything, imposing standards of behavior, looks, and norms. Interestingly, “Egypt is one of 15 countries worldwide with a heavy burden of tobacco-related ill health”, according to a 2015 report by the World Health Organization.

Another, more cultural and social take on Shu could be that of emptiness: the image of men smoking shisha in cafes is commonly associated with unemployment. The more time men spend doing this, idling as they watch and harass or judge neighborhood passersby, the more it’s apparent that they clearly don’t have work to get to.

MAAT: in vino veritas (2013)

Srđan: Justice, (the rule of) law, truth, balance, and morality, are closely associated with Maat. Her symbol is the ostrich’s feather and she was responsible for cosmic harmony. She, as a principle, was seen as a way to establish social order among the variety of conflicting groups and people living in ancient Egypt. In the Duat (the Egyptian underworld), she was one of the gods a person encountered in the afterlife when the hearts of the dead were weighed against her single feather.

Omar: My version shows Maat as happily drunk, with messy hair, clothes, and the ostrich’s feather. It’s as if you caught her at the end of a party. This viewpoint might seem desacralized, depicting the justice goddess’ fall from her duties. However, justice is elusive and can be manifested through excess (the bottle says in vino veritas in Latin, in wine lies the truth). She is also intended to be celebratory as Hathor.

PTAH: the crafter (2019)

Srđan: Another creator god, a pra deity, who, according to legend, existed before all other things and who conceived the world by thought and word. He is closely related to physical creation and is, therefore, the protector of all manual craftsmanship, as well as agriculture and the land. What’s his story now?

Omar: In this image, his agricultural aspect is emphasized, reminiscent of farmers who make up the majority of the population, but are neglected and unappreciated. He has the traditional green skin color, while his staff with symbols (ankh-djed-was) is transformed into a plowing tool. Farmers tend to be (and seen as) uneducated and poor, but a critical part of the society – after all, the whole ancient society came to be thanks to the fertile ground around the Nile. Even today, Egypt, despite being mostly a desert, is actually an agricultural country. Populist leaders (in Egypt, from Nasser to Sisi) often needed to get the farmers’ support to gain traction, and so they would do something for “the people”. The background is inspired by kilim tapestry patterns from rural areas.

HATHOR: dance, dance, dance (2013)

Srđan: The goddess of joy, feminine love, sexuality, music, and motherhood, she was also one of the companions of the deceased’s soul to the afterlife. She is usually depicted as a cow, or with a headdress with cow horns and the sun disk. I think this piece really needs the local context to be properly understood.

Omar: This is my favorite piece of the series. In my interpretation, she is a belly dancer, celebrating the body, femininity, entertainment, music, and love. She has the life symbol (ankh) and is one of the rare gods with a positive image in the series. I consider belly dancing – which originated in Egypt – is not given its rightful importance as part of contemporary dance. On one side, it’s recognized as part of Egypt’s popular culture (though ignored just like the pyramids and pharaohs), but on the other is also targeted by the conservative community due to body exposure, sexualized movements, and considered immoral. There is even an Act No. 430 of the law on censorship introduced in 2018, which states that “the dancing suit should cover the lower body, with no side slits, and should cover the breast and stomach area”, which Hathor happily refuses to comply with. The reading really depends on and reveals the onlookers’ ethics. If they are more on the liberal spectrum, they see the joyous tone of the piece, if they are more on the conservative side, they view her more within the same category as sex workers and consider it a cynical piece. Either way, it is one of the pieces I get asked most about, The role model for this image is the famous Egyptian actress and belly dancer Samia Gamal.

SETH: it’s either me or chaos! (2013)

Srđan: A complex and mysterious deity, Seth according to the myth of Osiris was responsible for killing Osiris and battling with Horus, and was seen as a god of chaos and disorder. He is depicted as what Egyptologists call Sha or Set animal, which appears to be a hybrid of “aardvark, a donkey, a jackal, or a fennec fox”. It’s not known if it was a real, misattributed, or extinct animal or even a fictional image. He was also the god of the desert, storms, and foreigners.

Omar: In The New Gods, Seth is a rebel, protesting and throwing a Molotov cocktail, wearing the Palestinian scarf (keffiyeh), which aside from being a symbol of Palestinian resistance, was used by protesters in Tahrir to protect themselves from teargas grenades. As such, he also represents the young people of the Egyptian Revolution. Here, just like with Hathor, the image is a test of personal beliefs, in this case, the political one. In one of his final public televised speeches in January 2011, president Hosni Mubarak famously said the revolution is a choice between chaos and stability, which was a constant justification for staying in power. Interestingly, during the Arab Spring, all the protesters at Tahrir square were accused of being foreigners, or foreign mercenaries, by the government, an accusation typical of oppressive and anti-democratic regimes. So depending on one’s interpretation of the events of the Arab Spring, this piece can be seen as either accurate or ironic.

Although traditionally portrayed as evil and adding to conflicting interpretations as an Arab Spring protester, I claim Seth is as important as his antipode, Horus. He is not bad or evil, rather creating a disbalance, a sign of social changes and otherness, the underdog. 

Omar Houssien (b. 1990) is an Egyptian-Australian artist with a background in design, illustration, and visual communication. Having completed his studies at the European Institute of Design in Milan, Italy, he returned to Cairo where he contributed work to art spaces and cultural initiatives, development programs, and various advertising campaigns.

In 2017, he participated in his first artist residency as part of the East Type West Type program at AGA Lab, culminating in a two-week exhibition at the Bijzondere Collecties (Amsterdam). From 2014 to 2018, he worked on the independent film Poisonous Roses (Cairo), which premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival and won several awards, eventually becoming Egypt’s 92nd Academy Awards submission for Foreign Film. In 2019, his work The New Gods was exhibited in Roznama 7, organized by Medrar for Contemporary Art (Cairo). He has had previous exhibitions in Cairo, Amsterdam, Milan and Belgrade. Instagram @oh.youfoundme

Srđan Tunić (b. 1984) is a freelance curator and researcher based in Belgrade, Serbia. He is a co-founder of Trans-Cultural Dialogues (as part of Cultural Innovators Network), Kustosiranje / About and Around Curating and Street Art Walks Belgrade initiatives. He is collaborating with art professionals, researching fields such as contemporary art, curatorial practices, street art and graffiti, science fiction, art appropriation, cultural diversity, experiential learning, independent cultural scene and self-management.

His texts have been published in the Kultura Journal, AFRIKA – Studies in art and culture, Transcultural Studies Journal, IJOCA – International Journal of Comic Art, SAUC – Street Art & Urban Creativity Scientific Journal, as well as web portals SEEcult, Uneven Earth, Balkanist, Makanje and Seismopolite magazine. www.srdjantunic.wordpress.com

Sumac Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. If you would like to share a collaboration proposal, please feel free to write us. We warmly invite you to follow us on Instagram and to subscribe to our newsletter and stay connected.

The post The New Gods—Omar Houssien in Conversation with Srđan Tunić appeared first on Sumac Space.

Some of the information presented in this text might be fictional. Thus, the author is leaving complete freedom for the reader to decide upon what might be factual or fictional.

The presented self-interview of Huda Takriti interrogates her multi-media installation of cities and private living rooms (2020) and reveals central interests of her work: the agency of lost archives and hidden biographies. In of cities and private living rooms a domestic mystery unfolds into a visual essay where images, family archives, various landscapes combined with text and memory intertwine with fiction, reality, the (hi)stories of migration and diaspora, identity and representation.

Q: Could you take us chronologically through the background of your work? When and how did you find out about your great-grandmother’s “secret” identity?

A: It all happened by the end of 2011, during a conversation with my older brother. He mentioned that he was wondering if there is a possibility to get a Polish passport if he can prove the origin of Fatima. Nevertheless, he was not sure if my mom or her family would want to speak about this openly!

That’s when I found out that my great-grandmother whom I had never met in person, but still have heard so much about, was in fact not completely the person I thought I knew. Fatima was not Lebanese. At least, not for her entire life. 

You can imagine how shocking it would have been for me to hear that piece of information. I thought that I already had a complex background; A Lebanese/Palestinian mother and a Syrian/Iranian father. Suddenly something else was added to the already complex batter.

My brother did not have much information. According to him, Fatima was Polish who managed to come to Syria with her family before or during WWII. She later moved to Lebanon. His source was one of our relatives who managed to track down a couple of Fatima’s relatives on Facebook. She even ended up meeting one of them; The grand-daughter of Fatima’s sister “Jamile” who now lives in the USA. My mom asked him not to share this with anyone when he tried to get more information from her. But it was too late for him to back off!

Q: And what happened next? 

A: Well, the first step I took was to go to my mom and ask her if this was true and for what reason was this kept a secret… At first, she refused to talk about it and constantly repeated, “There’s no need to talk about this” and “It’s already buried in the past, there’s no point in digging it up now”. However, after insisting for a while she shared her version of the story with me; Fatima was born in Damascus in 1887 to Polish parents whom have immigrated to Ottoman Syria¹. Her birth name was Victoria. Later in her life, Victoria traveled to Lebanon where she got married to a Lebanese Journalist and founder of Al-Ababeel newspaper, my great-grandfather “Hussain Al-Habbal²”, who gave her the name Fatima. She lived her life between Saida, a city in the south of Lebanon, Damascus and Kuwait. She died in Saida in 1967.

Q: So, your mother and your brother’s stories were somewhat incoherent?

A: To some extent, yes! Some of the details shared commonalities. I must mention both my mother and my brother were very sure of their versions. My mother was raised in Saida by her grandmother “Fatima” as her parents were working in Kuwait and wanted her to grow up in Lebanon. She says that Fatima was her best friend till the day she died. So, I consider her to be a reliable source of information. On the other hand, my brother’s source of information was proven by Fatima’s extended family member in the USA.

The more family members I’ve asked, the more versions of stories I encountered. Such discrepancies between the narratives became the starting point for this work. When Victoria’s/Fatima’s birth certificate showed up, it became even more confusing. The stories, at first, had a common thread, Poland. Moreover, after I finished the work last summer there was a new story mentioning Russia as the place of origin of Fatima’s parents.

Before the new story come to surface, there was a debate on which city or village did she come from. Some said Warsaw and others said Gdansk, and a debate considering the historical period of their departure. With an aim to find a trace of some kind of a historical record or a document which may lead me somewhere further, I left to Poland.

Q: But you have mentioned finding Victoria’s birth certificate. Didn’t it lead you somewhere in your research? 

A: The birth certificate was issued under the name Fatima Al-Shami, and it was later revealed that my great grandfather, Hussain, had this document made for her after their marriage. She kept this name when she chose to convert to Islam later in her life.

Q: It seems like you’ve got a lot of fiction going on in your family’s history. How do you reflect on what is factual and what is fictional in your work? Is it important for you that the viewers are able to distinguish between the two?

A: The work consists of two parts, a film installation and a family photo archive. Hints were implemented for the viewers here and there. In the film, I don’t only reflect on what is there I try to reflect on what is not there as well. By borrowing items from the photo archive and implementing them into the film.

The archive is shown via slide projection, the photos are real, what the viewers see is real. Nevertheless, the material and the form of the photos are manipulated. I don’t know if the original photos still exist somewhere but one relative had a digital copy of the photos uploaded to Facebook. 

The photos I am using were downloaded from Facebook and then returned to their analog state. In this process, some information and details of the photos were hidden away. The viewers can still see pixels and parts of the torn photo edges in the slide projection. Moreover, I leave it to them to decide what could be real and what not.

Q: The act of restoring or returning the photos to a unity that might not exist anymore suggests a form of fictional archive. Does it exemplify your tendency to collaborate with and rework historical material?

A: Honestly, I didn’t have a good sense of what exemplifies my work while working on this project. I’ve always been drawn to fictions that have documentary tendencies, and documents that open fictional pathways. It’s more clear for me now that I love to be on the edge between the factual and the fictional.

Q: In your video installation, the first question the viewers are confronted with is “Do we need the truth?”. One can say that the phrasing of the question is a key to the work. To whom are you addressing the question? Are you including yourself with the viewers?

A: There’s a big difference between saying “Do we need the truth?” and “Do we want the truth?”. Personally, phrasing the question this way was a reflection on the stage of my research where I realised that there is no point of seeking the truth anymore; Funny that these were my mom’s first words to me and it took me about eight years to realise that. Moreover, it was a hint left to the viewer about the process and how seeking the truth, this one truth in regard to others, appears to get lost further and further.

Q: This question comes after we hear your moms’ voice reciting what seems to be a memory of her grandmother at first which turns out to be a dream. Can you elaborate on the sequence of the narrative in the work and on the way the archive and the video installation engage in conversation with one another?

In the work, both the photo archive and the film installation are connected to each other. as you mentioned, the film begins with my moms’ voice reciting a dream she had the night Fatima died in 1967 during a phone call we had. At the time I was in Poland. She always finds a way of talking about a dream she had had when she is questioned about any topic. And that found its way to the visual narrative of the work which is constantly blurring the lines between dream and reality.

The narrative throughout the film is set to unite it with the photo archive. It starts by listing items and objects we can see in the photo archive, as if the narrator is looking straight at it. The narrative continues with comparisons and reflections on the images and places we see in the video. Geographies and archive images melt together into a visual essay. 

Q: You shot the video in Poland. Can you speak about the connection between the locations you filmed in and the story you are narrating? 

A: I went to Poland with an aim to find a lead to some kind of truth. Instead, I was surrounded by a landscape that carries a certain history. A history which most of my family members relate themselves to without being 100% sure of. I began to think about spaces and memory, how we relate ourselves to an unknown space.

I don’t know if you are familiar with Masao Adachi’s³ so-called Landscape Theory or Fukeiron, a strategy that Adachi implemented in his 1969 film AKA Serial Killer, which suggests the possibility of creating a portrait of someone through capturing the physical landscape that shaped them.

I was not interested in dogmatic adaptation of Adachi’s theory. My interest here lies in reversing it and searching for possibilities of positioning a person to a certain site or historical context. Time in Poland had me thinking of possibilities of creating someone’s portrait made up of patchy memories and unproven facts.

The landscape we see surrounded me during my time there, the narrative we hear is constantly referring to this landscape as one from a memory or a connection from the past. I never reveal the mystery of the work or the place it was filmed in till the last scene of a marathon in Warsaw; Warsaw becomes somewhere in-between a question and an answer – an imaginary ending point of sorts.

¹ Ottoman Syria refers to divisions of the Ottoman Empire within the Levant, usually defined as the region east of the Mediterranean Sea, west of the Euphrates River, north of the Arabian Desert and south of the Taurus Mountains. The Middle East and North Africa: 2004, Routledge, p1015.
² Hussain Al-habbal was born in Beirut in 1869, founded Ababeel newspaper in 1895, which was a political one. He criticized the alliance that had been established between France and Britain to divide the Middle East, so the French High Commissioner General Maxime Weygand sentenced him to prison in 1919. I. Kreidieh, Sons of the East p 496 – 497.
³ Masao Adachi (足立正生 Adachi Masao, born May 13, 1939) is a Japanese screenwriter and director who was most active in the 1960s and 1970s. He is best known for his writing collaborations with directors Kōji Wakamatsu and Nagisa Oshima

Huda Takriti (Damascus, 1990, lives and works in Vienna, Austria) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Vienna. In her artistic practice, she explores the relationship in between history, politics, memories and counter memories and the construction of our own subjectivities. She uses different media to work with these issues, such as video, film, installation, painting, and performative situations. In most of her works, she tempts to generate questions about how we relate to others, how we tell personal stories in the frame of the collective history and how do we deal with our patrimony and traditions.

Takriti has participated in many international group exhibitions and festivals, including exhibitions at Universitätsgalerie im Heiligenkreuzerhof (Austria), Kunsthalle Wien (Austria), Afro Asiatisches Institut (Austria), [.Box] Video Art Project Space (Italy), STIFF Student International Film Festival (Croatia), Stiftung Mercator (Germany), Kunstraum Lakeside (Austria), Centre d’art Sa Quartera (Spain), Addaya Centre for Contemporary Arts (Spain), Krinzinger Lesehaus (Austria) and University of Applied Arts _ Die Angewandte (Austria). Huda received Kunsthalle Prize 2020 (Austia), Ettijahat Production Award, Laboratory of Arts, 7th Edition 2020 (Lebanon), Styria-Artist-in-Residence fellowship 2016 (Austria) and BMUKK and Kulturkontakt Austria residency fellowship 2014 (Austria).

Sumac Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. If you would like to share a collaboration proposal, please feel free to write us. We warmly invite you to follow us on Instagram and to subscribe to our newsletter and stay connected.

The post Of Cities and Private Living Rooms—Huda Takriti in Conversation with Huda Takriti appeared first on Sumac Space.