Morehshin Allahyari - In Mere Spaces All Things Are Side By Side I

In Mere Spaces All Things Are Side By Side I (2014)

In Mere Spaces All Things Are Side By Side explores the complex adoption and accessibility of the internet in the Global South. Rather than thinking about technology from a position of privilege, it focuses on the gap, failure, limitation, and the frustration of access to technology. This piece is inspired by my saved Yahoo chat histories from a 4 year long online relationship when I lived in Iran, but rather than delving into the relationship itself, it creates an imagined space between physical and virtual to connect the failure of the relationship to the failure of technology and communication.

Morehshin Allahyari - Bitrates

بیت بر ثانیه – Bitrates (2014)

Bitrates is the first New Media Art exhibition in the city of Shiraz in Iran, curated and organized by artists Morehshin Allahyari and Mani Nilchiani, hosted by Dar-ol-Hokoomeh Project at Shiraz Artist House. With a vision to create a space dedicated to emerging artistic practices, workshops, talks, presentations and exhibitions, Dar-ol-Hokoomeh Project (co-founded by Mohsen Hazrati and Milad Forouzandeh) seeks to expose the creative community and general public to the potentials of new technologies and New Media theory and practice.

In their curation process, Morehshin and Mani have selected artists that each use variety of digital tools, material, and software in their works to present a specific category and technological aesthetics of new media art; from artgame, creative coding, experimental 3D animation to glitch art and animated GIF. The significance of the term “Bit Rate” is two fold: On the one hand, every digital art work at one point or the other needs to navigate the bottleneck of “bits”. Ideas turn into bits, bits are streamed over a network, to a screen, or to a tangible output such as a 3D printer to form an experience. While simultaneously, as a generation who sought their exposure to the world outside through slow, clunky dial-up modems, our interaction with the world at large was at the mercy of “bit rate”. بیت بر ثانیه (Bitrates) draws attention to these ideas through the presentation of the work that engages and explores technology and internet as a medium.

Featuring: Morehshin Allahyari, Benjamin Bacon, Andrew Blanton, Alex Myers, Brenna Murphy, Ramsey Nasser, Mani Nilchiani, Daniel Rourke, Alfredo Salzar-Caro, Angela Washko.

A lecture and a Q & A session will be held with Morehshin Allahyari and Mani Nilchiani at Daralhokoomeh on Sunday May 25th, 6:30 PM.

Website: http://daralhokoomeh.com

***GIFbites is one of the projects of Bitrates exhibition (curated by Daniel Rourke). For the opening of Bitrates, a selected version of this project was displayed in the gallery, followed by a complete showcase of all the GIFs for the GIFbites exhibition, May 30th-June 6.

Morehshin Allahyari - Like Pearls

Like Pearls (2014)

Like Pearls is a web-based project, created by using mash-up of images and GIFs collected from Allahyari’s Farsi email spam for online underwear stores based in Iran. Per Iran’s Islamic law, the bodies of the underwear models are whited out, erased or covered with a pattern, creating a surreal image of sensuality and censorship.

The addition of sparkly, gaudy GIFs with a digital version of “I Want it That Way” by the Backstreet Boys in the background add the surrealness of the images. When the viewer clicks on various GIFs, a pop-up window appears with a passive-aggressive line of text that supposedly indicates romance or love, though in a slightly menacing manner (“I want you to be mine forever,” or “Let her wear your love”).

Through the use of cliche images of love and romance, and the contradictory nature of underwear advertisements for an Islamic culture, Like Pearls examines how the kitsch aesthetics of spam and advertisement on the Iranian web is a complex phenomena, involving layers of cultural and religious censorship and oppression toward women and romance.

—-> ARTIST’S NOTEBOOK/PROCESS

Visit the Project Website

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