Sideways in Tehran

Sideways in Tehran

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with works and contributions from:
Bassam Chekhes
Atousa Bandeh Ghiasabadi
Katrin Korfmann
Sara Blokland
Nickel van Duijvenboden
and
Tina Rahimy
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How does a shift in the context of a piece of art influence its ability to be recognized and the validity of the work? How can art be judged from another culture? Is quality universal?

These questions are the starting point of the project Sideways.

Atousa Bandeh Ghiasabadi / Visual Artist/ Film Maker asked 5 artist and writers to research this questions and produce an artwork to be presented in two different exhibitions one in Tehran and in the Netherlands and finalized with a Publication(book).
Sideways in Tehran will literary replacing the context.
Bandeh being part of a minority group with a non-western background in the Netherlands often questioned the comprehensibility of her work by the western audience not familiar with her cultural history. Now she will reverse the process by exhibiting works of a group of artist in the context which is familiar to Bandeh but not to them. In this she hope to find out a more objective approach through her own experience but also through the experiences by participants of Sideways.

Katrin Korfmann / visual artist, living in Amsterdam, NL
Katrin Korfmann is analyzing the often-quoted ´magic moment´ of photography. Or we could say she plays with it. The time factor of the ´magic moment´ is stretched, deconstructed, duplicated and subsequently assembled.She observes places of daily life, humans and machines, stages of public space.
Finally the space and the experienced time at the location is documented en coded again to a location never experienced like this. The image is document and invention at the same time.
For the project sideways Korfmann relates to her hometown West-Berlin (Germany) and the change of the city since the wall came down. The photograph fast forward (Checkpoint Charlie) 145 x 253 cm is showing a crossing point between former East and West Berlin. 20 years after the cold war this spot is one of the most demanded tourist attractions of the city. Fake American and Russian soldiers play theatre there. They sell visas with stamps and are bargaining over original gasmasks and GDR flags.
For money one can pose with the soldier to get the most wanted holiday snapshot.
The monument of the cold war becomes a funny game. A busy movement, a film set, where visitors try to catch the spectacular moments of German history.

Sara Blokland / visual artist
Her works often explores the representation of the concept of family, exploring the confusion and ambiguity between the personal and impersonal. As a artist she interested in deconstructing the exotic subject, and reconstructing new ones. Her photographic images challenge the exotic presumptions of the dominant culture. How is the exotic part of the representation of the Western artist in the search for a ‘’original view’ and understanding the subject..In two short films ‘’Brother’’ and ‘’Roos’’, she will reflect on photography as a ''exotic'' object and incorporating the personal experience of one viewer and photographer.

Nickel van Duijvenboden Photographer/writer turned from photography to writing and is operating in the grey area between visual art and literature. He uses his experiences as a former member of a punk band as a point of departure for a short fiction — punk being a highly idealistic, non-conformist subculture which is supposedly Western (or is it?). In Teheran, he will combine photographs with a text about one particular aspect of his experiences."

Bassam Chekhes (Syria, 1965) Film Maker graduated from audiovisual department at the rietveld academy and mainly is making short films.The subjects of his films are related to his personal surrounding and have a direct contact with his own experience, as if they are a dairy or a biography.He prefers to work with different images as the starting elements for his films rather than text or a complete script, and to experiment the relation between the subject of the film and the related form that finally get."

Tina Rahimy philosopher researching at Erasmus university Rotterdam

Her research will focus on the choice of literature as a form of expression. Why do strangers, like refugees choose to write, why do they choose language of the host country? Language, the most demanding element, the crown witness of our alienation, not only in its content but also in its form. Do these writers however believe in the deficiency of their speech, or rather acknowledge the hesitation in and of a language as and characteristic element of any speech?

Sideways is sponsored by Visual Arts, Architecture & Design fund Netherlands Fonds BKVB
The exhibition is organized & curated by Amirali Ghasemi
Sideways project is a project by Atousa Bandeh Ghiasabadi Artist/Filmmaker Intendant for Cultural Diversity, Sideways started in 2007 and will be finalized by presenting a book and an exhibition in the Netherlands in 2009.

Poster is designed by Behrad Javanbakht for Parkingallery Studio.

NEVER BEEN TO TEHRAN

NEVER BEEN TO TEHRAN
October 19 - November 16, 2007

(photo credits clockwise from top left: Sal Randolph, USA; Heidi Hove Pedersen, Denmark; Greg Halpern and Ahndraya Parlato, USA; Otto Von Busch, Sweden and Turkey; France Martin Krusche, Austria; Jon Rubin, USA; Keiko Tsuji, Japan; Iyallola Tillieu, Belgium)

EXHIBITION VENUES: Parkingallery, Tehran, Iran; Caravansarai, Istanbul, Turkey; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, USA; Media and Interdisciplinary Arts Center, Auckland, New Zealand; Koh-I-Noor, Copenhagen, Denmark; Mess Hall, Chicago, USA; Pittsburgh Cultural Trust (Downtown Electronic Jumbotron), Pittsburgh, USA; ; Embryosalon, Berlin, Germany; and live on the web at WWW.NeverBeenToTehran.COM

NEVER BEEN TO TEHRAN, organized by artist Jon Rubin and curator Andrea Grover, is a worldwide exhibition with 29 international participants who will be contributing photographs of what they imagine the city of Tehran to look like, to a universal photo-sharing website. The photographs will be streamed to each exhibition venue as a continuously evolving slideshow, with more photographs being uploaded daily throughout the exhibition. The participants will use a variety of research methods to imagine the culture, landscape, and people of Tehran, using only their primary city of residence as the location of their photographs.

Exhibition Description Imagine a city that you've only seen in reproductions or perhaps have merely heard about. A place, like many others, that only exists for you through indirect sources--the nightly news, hearsay, literature, magazines, movies, and the Internet. Using these secondhand clues as firsthand research materials, invited worldwide participants--who have Never Been to Tehran--will take photographs (from their home base) of what they imagine Tehran to look like. Contributors will upload their photos daily to an on-line photosharing site, which will be projected as a slideshow simultaneously in galleries and public spaces around the world (including Tehran). Anything that anyone might take a photograph of is fair game, just as long as it feels like Tehran.

For the international contributors to this exhibition, the task is to search through their daily lives for clues to a foreign place, for the possibility that somewhere else exists right under their noses and that, like some clunky form of astral projection, one can travel to other lands without leaving home. New information technologies are expanding the possibility of knowing a place to which you've never traveled. Hosts of amateur and commercial websites and podcasts about a given city, its economy, demographics, culture and subculture have opened the way for a new vernacular of representation.

As Tehran's image is regularly depicted in the dominant media, it is a compelling challenge for the participants in this exhibition to sift through the glut of images and information to cull out a personally constructed version of an unfamiliar place. For viewers in Tehran, the exhibition presents a chance to witness an unusual mirroring of their globally projected image, taken from the daily lives and environs of outsiders. Collectively, the artists and viewers of Never Been to Tehran will be charting a liminal space stuck somewhere between here and there that in our contemporary existence just might be home.

Participants: Dean Baldwin, Canada; Aideen Barry, Ireland; Cedric Bomford, Canada; Otto Von Busch, Sweden and Turkey; James Charlton, New Zealand; Sara Graham, Canada; Andrea Grover, USA; Deniz Gul, Turkey; Greg Halpern and Ahndraya Parlato, USA; Levin Haegele, England; Rumana Husain, Pakistan; Jun'ichiro Ishii, France; Martin Krusche, Austria; Rosie Lynch, Germany; Francesco Nonino, Italy; Elena Perlino, Italy; Heidi Hove Pedersen, Denmark; Sal Randolph, USA; Alia Rayya, Israel/Palestinian Territories; Jon Rubin, USA; Jakob Seibel, Germany; Iyallola Tillieu, Belgium; Keiko Tsuji, Japan; Lee Walton, USA; Lindsey White, USA; Christian Sievers, Germany; Zoe Strauss, USA

Never Been to Houston

Never Been to Houston
March 9-April 14
Lawndale Art Center, Houston, Texas
Curated by Aurora Picture Show and Jon Rubin

Imagine a city that you've only seen in reproductions or perhaps have merely heard about. A place, like many others, that exists only through rumors, stories, novels, the nightly news, magazines, movies, and the Internet. Using these secondhand clues as firsthand research material, invited worldwide contributors-who have Never Been to Houston- will photographically document (without leaving home) what they imagine Houston to look like. Contributors will upload their photos daily to an on-line Flickr site, which will be projected as a slideshow in Houston's Lawndale gallery. Anything that anyone might take a photograph of is fair game. Just as long as it feels like Houston.

For the contributors to this exhibition, the task is to search through their daily life for clues to a foreign place, for the possibility that somewhere else exists right under their nose and that, like some clunky form of astral projection, you can travel to other lands without leaving home. For viewers in Houston, it's a chance to witness an unusual mirroring of their globally projected image. In addition to the traditions of storytelling and travel guides, new information technologies are expanding the possibility of knowing a place to which you've never traveled. Three-dimensional electronic maps, 360 degree images, hosts of amateur and commercial websites and podcasts about a given city, its economy, demographics, culture and subculture have opened the way for a new vernacular of representation.

In the end, Never Been to Houston is an experimental, virtual travelogue to the city that the New York Times opines "refuses to assume a simply identity."

Amirali Ghasemi from parkingallery is also one of the invited contributers.