News from Tehran 1 is a project by Nasrin Tabatabai, in collaboration with Babak Afrassiabi. With the participation of: Saeideh Akbari, Kiarash Anvari, Arta group, Javad Emami, Kambiz Ghavamzadeh, Farzaneh Khademian, Pirooz Kalantari, Bahman Kiarostami, Akram Mahmoudian, Maani Petgar and Nahid Rezaei.
News From Tehran 1 is based on current artistic and cultural practices in Iran, developed through communications and exchanges with Iranian artists working in different disciplines. The project attempts to work with different topics of social, political and cultural representations already implicitly addressed in the work of the artists involved. Therefore, the project is neither developed on the basis of a predefined concept, nor is it seeking to fit individual works into preconceptions of cultural locality and representations. The result may be one of a multiplicity of concepts introduced by the works presented.
The project takes a horizontal approach, trying to work explicitly with differentiations in artistic activity and production. It can be seen as part of the broader concern with investigating how artistic practices in Iran are both constituted by and seek to address social, political and cultural conditions in their particular methods of representation. The narratives these practices communicate are often themselves marked by difference and dissonance. And as such they not only resist subjectivization but also tend to escape becoming mere examples of cultural difference.
News from Tehran is a rather allusive reference to these differentiations and dissonances. “News” does not refer to the presented works as news or means of mediating news from Tehran, but rather to events and conditions circulating between artistic activities and their sociopolitical context, beyond locality. In this presentation, the project introduces already existing works alongside works in progress, narratives circulating in the space of the presentation as processes of research and formation of representations.
Together with the presentation of News from Tehran 1 the first issue of the bilingual (Farsi/English) periodical Pages will be presented. Pages is a collaborative project of Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi.