The Chelsea Art Museum is pleased to announce the opening of its upcoming exhibition Iran Inside Out. The groundbreaking exhibition features 35 artists living and working in Iran alongside 21 others living in the Diaspora. The result is a multifarious portrait of 56 contemporary Iranian artists challenging the conventional perceptions of Iran and Iranian art.
The exhibiton will be traveling to the Farjam Collection/Hafiz Foundation in Dubai in March 2010. The exhibition is the second of three exhibitions under CAM's EastWest Project in 2009 which aims to promote and foster cross cultural dialogue.
Constellations will inaugurate the 798 Beijing Biennale, bringing together over 70 Chinese and international artists for exhibitions in Beijing's 798 art district. Works will include painting, sculpture, works-on-paper, photography, video, installation, performance, sound works, media art, and site-specific public art. Constellations will be exhibited in the 798 exhibition space as well as other venues located within Dashanzi Art District.
Theme
Constellations stems from the notion that stars in a constellation are often vastly distant from each other, but they appear close to each other from the perspective of Earth. Nearness and farness, inside and outside, and global and local are some of the concepts that Constellations uses as touchstones, but situates them relative to each other or in states of parallax. In other words, shifting demographics engendered by migration and the circulation of information foment heterogeneous, cross-cultural, and polyphonic articulations that make binary rubrics, such as those previously mentioned, limited.
Beijing is ideal for this unique biennale because it is a megalopolis located between the future and the past—a confluence of the pre-modern, modern, and postmodern that, in turn, reconfigures globalization in a manner more complicated and multidimensional than in other areas of the world. Some of the exhibiting foreign artists, for example, live in Beijing and the artworks made there absorb the locality yet are also refracted through the artists' peripatetic biographies, creating a more fluid exchange between artistic practices within and outside of Beijing. Apart from the international artists who live and work in Beijing, other foreign artists will create site-specific projects or present works that were made outside of China and modified by interfacing with a wholly different context. On the other hand, many of the native Beijing artists that will exhibit have not only traveled extensively outside of China for exhibitions or residencies, but the work selected or made specifically for Constellations will also highlight the global nature of their work while maintaining the specificity of their geo-cultural location.
Ultimately, Constellations raises more questions than it attempts to answer, particularly in a city where international cultural tectonics perpetually shift and reshape the social landscape in altogether unforeseen ways.
Selseleh/Zelzeleh: Movers & Shakers in Contemporary Iranian Art
May 27, 2009 - August 20, 2009
The Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller (LTMH) Gallery is presenting a group exhibition, Selseleh/Zelzeleh: Movers & Shakers in Contemporary Iranian Art, from May 28 through August 20, 2009. Comprising more than 50 seminal works from as many as 40 artists, Selseleh/Zelzeleh (loosely translated as Tradition/Tremor) seeks to illuminate the depth and richness of Iranian art from the post WWII generation to the present. A number of works, including paintings, sculpture, photography, works on paper, and video will be on view for the first time in the U.S. A fully-illustrated color catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Selseleh/Zelzeleh: Movers & Shakers in Contemporary Iranian Art, opening with a reception on May 27 from 6 to 8 p.m., coincides with the Chelsea Art Museum's summer exhibition, Iran Inside Out, June 26-September 5, 2009, an exploration of the new Persian avant-garde.
The featured artists in Selseleh/Zelzeleh – some living in Iran, some living internationally – are all Iranian or of Iranian descent and share a common ground due to their rich culture and heritage. Alongside the most celebrated Persian artists, the show is introducing newcomers. These artists include: Samira Abbassy, Negar Ahkami, Shiva Ahmadi, Roya Akhavan, Massoud Arabshahi, Kamrooz Aram, Shoja Azari & Shahram Karimi, Ali Chitsaz, Alireza Dayani, Reza Derakshani, Ala Ebtekar, Hossein Edalatkhah, Mohammad Ehsai, Roya Farassat, Mehdi Farhadian, Golnaz Fathi, Bita Fayyazi, Shadi Ghadirian, Daryoush Gharahzad, Ramin Haerizadeh, Khosrow Hassanzadeh, Bahman Jalali, Pouran Jinchi, YZ Kami, Farideh Lashai, Tala Madani, Pooneh Maghazehe, Mehdi Mirbagheri, Ardeshir Mohassess, Farhad Moshiri, Shirin Neshat, Nicky Nodjoumi, Nazanin Pouyandeh, Sohrab Sepehri, Sadegh Tabrizi, Parviz Tanavoli, Sadegh Tirafkan, Darius Yektai, and Charles Hossein Zenderoudi. Affirming a continuous dialogue that exists between the generations, these artists explore a multiplicity of divergences from the past that are equally grounded in a respect for cultural continuity as well as in the freshness of youthful innovation. While borrowing from tradition, they have developed their own highly unique artistic language resulting in work that is bold, emotionally charged, and, at times, politically and socially motivated.
Leila Taghinia Milani Heller Gallery
39 East 78th Street at Madison Avenue
Third Floor, New York NY 10075
T 212-249-7695
F 212-249-76
The boys over at Red Party NYC invited me back for a second round of torching on May 9, 09 - good times, good people, good music, and best of all : I branded tons of stuff for people ;)
"Iran Inside/Out at the Chelsea Art Museum presents 50 contemporary artists living both inside and out of Iran. The curators, Till Fellrath and Sam Bardaouil, describe the context and intent of the show, and four of the artists –Pooneh Maghazehe, Pouran Jinchi, Samira Abbassy, and Shoja Azari– discuss their art, the challenges they faced implementing this exhibit, and the importance of self-expression in the face of a repressive government….and pending revolution."
Chelsea Art Museum proudly presents a panel discussion in conjunction with the Persian Arts Festival to contextualize its current exhibition, Iran Inside Out. The discussion will be centered on the five main themes of Iran Inside Out: War and politics, gender and sexuality, culture as commodity, reinventing the traditional art forms and street culture within Tehran. The panel will be followed by a rooftop performance by Hypernova, an indie-rock band from Tehran. Iran Inside Out is a groundbreaking exhibition featuring 35 artists that live and work in Iran, some exhibiting abroad for the first time, alongside 21 others living in the Diaspora. The result is a multifarious portrait of 56 contemporary Iranian artists challenging the conventional perceptions of Iran and Iranian art. PAF will provide a transcription of the panel and post it on their blog found at www.persianartsfestival.org for further commentary.
Panelists:
· Livia Alexander - Executive Director of ArteEast (moderator)
· Sam Bardaouil - Curator, Iran Inside Out
· Samira Abbassy - Featured Artist
· Pooneh Maghazehe - Featured Artist
· Darius Yektai - Featured Artist
Friday, July 24, 2009
Exhibition open from 12-5pm
Opening/closing party 5-9pm
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The New Haven show: Immediate, mediated, concrete (incomplete)
Featuring work by Anthony Fuller, Pooneh Maghazehe, Elise Glick, Tim Johnson, Paul Fittipaldi, and Sophie Larrimore. Curated by Ardalan Keramati.
Immediate, mediated, concrete (incomplete) presents the work of six artists. All the work in the exhibition begins from a recognizable, if not vernacular or generic, visual or conceptual foundation. From greeting cards and an exploration of the tropes of bourgeois sentimentality (Anthony Fuller) to the transubstantiation of consumerist essentials—the quotidian becoming objects with aesthetic and cultural implications (Pooneh Maghazehe); to unassuming and silent palimpsestic totems (Elise Glick); to language as art, as art (Tim Johnson); to deceptively sterile appropriations and objets d’art culled from the recent past and a hopeful future (Paul Fittipaldi); to a reanimating of the overlooked, painting devoid of its original aristocratic subject, simpler and more complex (Sophie Larrimore).
The title of the exhibition comes from an incomplete understanding of an oversimplification of one of G.W.F. Hegel’s most significant contributions to philosophy—duly influenced by a skimming of the Hegel section of the Wikipedia entry for “Dialectic.” (The apparently misleading formulation, originating in the terminology of Kant and Fichte, has had pedagogic legs, thesis-antithesis-synthesis.) Exposited with qualified confidence, and necessary ignorance, immediate-mediated-concrete is an attempt to articulate the way in which logic, for Hegel, is. The immediate is the immediate. The act of engaging what is underlying, possibly contradictory, engaging that which is an analysis of the immediate, the mediation of it, what happens thus is expressed as sublation (the accepted translation for the original aufheben). What we are presented with, what we engage, in life, whether through the mind or the senses—in itself a terribly flawed, false dualism—this is the immediate. The immediate is incomplete in itself and cannot lead to the concrete without mediation, without a taking-apart and an interpreting, an experiential testing. The “ends,” the concrete, however improbable, a situation arising through aufheben, are, again, misleading. What is available is an incomplete fullness, forever unsatisfied, but nevertheless a plenary of Being.
“The easiest thing of all is to pass judgments on what has a solid substantial content; it is more difficult to grasp it, and most of all difficult to do both together and produce the systematic exposition of it.” – Hegel
I am looking at my copy of Phenomenology of Spirit, abandoned after §37 of the preface. I did return to it as an ambitious philosophy student, in the form of, regrettably, a deficient baptism, as it was a mid-level survey of 19th-century European philosophy. This is incomplete. Getting what you can from what is resolved and complete in-itself, albeit only abstractly, but in relation to my overture, my opening to it, it is unresolved, incomplete. The whole thing is unresolvable to begin with.
Two never becomes one, but can be two as one.
“Things that would get expelled from other kinds of writing by laughter multiply and flourish in art writing.” – Clement Greenberg, via Mel Bochner
Immediate, mediated, concrete (incomplete) is a one-day event, an art installation in an apartment in downtown New Haven, CT. In conjunction with the exhibition, a limited-edition publication will available, including contributions from the artists.
This exhibition would not be possible without the support and generosity of Carol Lopez Smith.
For further information please contact Ardalan Keramati (ardalan.keramati@gmail.com) or Elise Glick (glick.elise@gmail.com).
