Iran Archives - Morehshin Allahyari

August 9, 2023

WOMXN, LIFE, FREEDOM, Pt. III: Transnational Feminism: Womxn, Life, Freedom is a Daily Practice

Transnational Feminism: Womxn, Life, Freedom is a Daily Practice

Featuring Aytak Akbari-Dibavar, Shokoofeh Dezfuli, Katayoun Keshavarzi, and Morehshin Allahyari, with Persis M. Karim

Thursday, June 1, 2023

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

WOMXN, LIFE, FREEDOM is an online event series for co-learning, co-growing, solidarity, and kinship with our Iranian siblings. We come together as artists, thinkers, and organizers,mainly in the diaspora, to share, amplify, and weave together a refusal of long-lasting cultural and political gender/sexual oppression in Iran. The ongoing “Woman, Life, Freedom” or Jina revolution was sparked by the killing of 22-year-old Kurdish Jina (Mahsa) Amini in the hands of the regime’s police on September 16, 2022. Ever since, Iran has experienced a nationwide uprising, primarily led by women and marginalized ethnic groups demanding an end to the current Islamic regime and the establishment of a society free of oppression, discrimination, and dictatorship. As our days unfold between hope in the power of the Iranian people’s resistance, and despair from unthinkable violence by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, how might we continue to participate and show solidarity, using “Woman, Life, Freedom is a daily practice” as our mantra? The series explores this question by providing a platform for growth and support through practice-based conversations.

In Pt. III of the series, we will look at centering feminism in the fight against patriarchy and dictatorship, examining feminist struggles as struggles against all modes of oppression including ethnicity, class, and religion Through dialogue, we’ll explore solidarity for Iran beyond words, and what a truly transnational feminism looks like.

Aytak Dibavar (she/they) is an Iranian activist, artist, and professor of Gender and Social Justice at McMaster University, Canada. Aytak’s work/research are entangled with feminist, queer, decolonial, and anti-racist knowledge production as well as creative/art-based teaching practices. She researches and writes about race, gender, memory, political trauma and silence. Aytak has a great passion for people and their lived experiences. She is interested in life-narratives; how individuals navigate and interpret their own stories, including whether and how they choose to share them with others or remain silent. As an artist, Aytak not only finds solace and self-expression through painting and poetry but also incorporates these art forms into their daily life and pedagogical practices.

Shokoofeh Dezfuli is an Iranian artist and writer based in Pennsylvania. Her work centers around transnational feminism, community care, and the pursuit of ecological and social justice. Shokoofeh aims to shed light on the intricate power dynamics present in social structures, with the goal of sparking conversations and inspiring transformative action. By exploring feminist ethics of care, she hopes to challenge existing paradigms and imagine new ways to collectively combat systems of oppression.

Katayoun Keshavarzi was born in Iran in 1980, and moved to Sweden in 2009. Since then, Keshavarzi has started a publishing company and worked as an interpreter, translator and teacher, among other things. Through the years, Keshavarzi has been politically active as an intersectional feminist, especially on social media, analyzing and discussing issues related to politics, gender, inequalities, human rights, etc. In 2019, Keshavarzi started studying applied sociological research at Stockholm University and received a Bachelor’s degree in 2022. In Fall 2023, Keshavarzi will begin the second and last year of a masters program in the same field.

May 22, 2023

WOMXN, LIFE, FREEDOM: Building Political Power Through Feminist Collective Work (2023)

Feminists for Jina member Manijeh Moradian, Woman* Life Freedom Collective member Ozi Ozar, and a Begoo Collective member join artist Morehshin Allahyari for a conversation. We conclude with a reading by Rooja Mohassessy.

Thursday, March 16, 2023

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

In Pt. I, Building Political Power Through Feminist Collective Work, Iranian artists, scholars, and organizers, each representing a feminist collective or network, will come together for a conversation moderated by the series organizer and artist Morehshin Allahyari. Grassroots feminist collectives are some of many collective groups formed since the killing of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in September 2022. Collective action is usually construed as a tool wielded to affect political and societal change. This panel will explore the goals, work ethics, process, and trial- and-error innate to establishing a collective group, and will make a case for how we can build power through feminist collective work.

Feminists for Jina: is a network of feminist collectives and activists from different cities around the world, with diverse lived and learned experiences and viewpoints, united to echo and reinforce the voice of the ongoing “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” Revolution of Iran and to strengthen its transnational elements. Since the beginning of the revolution in Iran, the slogan, “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” has brought those of us in the diaspora together and Jina has become the symbol of our fight. The revolution has strengthened our determination to unite in order to achieve our goal of equality and freedom, and to fight alongside the people inside Iran and other feminist liberation movements for making a better world.

Begoo Collective: A collective of Iranian feminists inside and outside of Iran, Begoo Collective is invested in cultivating a transnational dialogue, particularly among the people of the Global South, in solidarity with the uprising of the Iranian people, especially Womxn, the LGBTQ+, and all marginalized communities. Centering JIN JÎYAN AZADÎ (Woman, Life, Freedom) and in a fight against systemic historical erasure, through a feminist, anti-colonial, and transnational lens, Begoo Collective strives to amplify the Iranian people’s acts of bravery and resistance, and to archive the violence and the oppression their bodies continue to endure.

Woman* Life Freedom Collective: The mission of Woman Life Freedom Collective* is to support the resistance in Iran and forge and fortify transnational unity and solidarity beyond group-based political identities and national borders. We aim to respect, echo, and protect the struggle and resistance of people in Iran and call inflicted upon in all groups to do the same. We invite everyone to set aside the differences and demands only to chant in unison the political demands of this moment and this generation: Woman* Life Freedom.

May 22, 2023

هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini (2022)

Join us on Wednesday, January 4 for an evening of informal conversations هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini (translated from Farsi as “sitting together”) in solidarity and kinship with our Afghan and Iranian siblings. We come together as artists and organizers in the diaspora, to share, amplify, and weave together a trajectory of long-lasting cultural and political gender/sexual oppression in Iran and Afghanistan. In the tradition of a هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini event, we will use our personal and collective memories and stories as points of departure to raise awareness and imagine together, alongside audience members, what a transnational feminist approach might look like.

Beyond the shared histories of patriarchal violence and control over our bodies, the current parallel political events unfolding in Iran and Afghanistan are reminders that the closer and more attuned we are to one another’s struggles, the more forceful our actions can be in building new models of sisterhood.

As we enter the fourth month of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolution in Iran, sparked by the killing of 22-year-old Kurdish Jina (Mahsa) Amini in the hands of the regime’s police, the Taliban government has seized power in Afghanistan resulting in a ban and further violence preventing girls from attending school and universities (among other edicts restricting women’s lives). Both the Islamic Republic Regime and Taliban use violence and constraints on women’s bodies, freedom of choice, and movement. As we center feminism in the fight against patriarchy and dictatorship, we equally see feminist struggles as struggles against all modes of oppression, including ethnicity, class, and religion. We are not free, until we are all free.

Jin. Jîyan. Azadî.

Womxn. Life. Freedom.

This event is held in conjunction with the exhibition Always In My Heart, curated by Muheb Esmat and currently on view at Smack Mellon.

***هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini is a discussion and storytelling series with a focus on the global south, organized by Morehshin Allahyari since 2017.

Participating Artists

Shiraz Fazli

Bahareh K.

Nooshin Rostami

Zelikha Zohra Shoja

Organized and moderated by Morehshin Allahyari.

Morehshin Allahyari - She Who Sees the Unknown

January 11, 2017

She Who Sees the Unknown (2017-2021)

November 1, 2015

Refiguring the Feminist Future (2018)

In 2018, I was invited to serve as the curator for the web residencies by Solitude & ZKM. We issued an open call and the response was overwhelming: More than 200 artists, activists, poets, writers, feminists, and dreamers answered with project proposals for challenging existing histories and speculative futures through storytelling and counternarratives imagining using the web as their platform. Four applicants were chosen as the new residents: Umber Majeed, Tesia Komalski, Luiza Prado, and Rasheedah Phillips, who will worked on their projects over the next four weeks.

For the web residencies call on the topic »Refiguring the Feminist Future,« we hoped for submissions that would provide insight into new reimaginations and possibilities of the female future; ideas that could claim nonlinear time and noncontiguous space; stories and poetics that could use the web as an activist/imaginative platform, or would make something invisible visible in refiguring the Feminist Futures. We asked »How can we tell stories of alternative (and specially nonwestern) futures that are not that of Silicon Valley? How can mythology, fiction/science fiction, and other forms of digital storytelling become practices for being more visible?«

In selecting the four winners, I looked for projects that somehow met these criteria and answered some of these questions in the most creative and meaningful ways. Projects that go beyond the dominant Western ideas of the future and focus on a feminism that is more than women (a non-male, non-cis, non-white, nonwestern re-figuration). In Rasheedah Phillips’s proposal, she proposes »The Black Woman Temporal Portal«: a toolkit focusing on nonlinear timescape/time displacement, preparing the black women, femmes, and girls to create the Black womanist, quantum future(s).

Rasheedah Phillips, Concept: https://schloss-post.com/futures-black-quantum-womanist/

Similarly, Luiza Prado proposes to use the web as a platform for a GIF essay for »reframing of the history of birth control, presenting narratives not as part of a linear and universal continuum, but rather as part of a fragmented, fast-paced pluriverse that meshes what is perceived as past, present, and future.« Both Phillips and Prado expand the web to a space for poetics and activism: building toolkits and archives that empower a nonlinear representation of histories and futures of and by and for women of color; which has been hidden and silenced by our world’s political and social systems.

Concept, Luiza Prado: https://schloss-post.com/all-directions-at-once/

Umber Majeed’s proposal takes the form of a powerful speculative fiction exploring »the feminist historicization of Pakistan as the first ›Muslim nuclear state‹ through state and familial archives … subversively implicating the bodies of citizens specifically women as the containers to perpetuate state sanctioned notions of love, science, and nature.«

Umber Majeed, Concept: Concept: https://schloss-post.com/name-hypersurface-present/

Tesia Kosmalski imagines a future for the refigured female body in which »a woman plans to heal her painful skeletal disorder by traveling to a moss-covered volcanic island. Scientists there have been synthesizing human bone and moss tissue to encourage new plant growth in an over-industrialized landscape … This woman is now in a post-procedure, photosynthetic transgenesis.«

Concept, Tesia Kosmalski: https://schloss-post.com/photosynthetic-transgenesis-chronicles-moss-woman/

In both Majeed and Kosmalski’s projects we are promised to look at a speculative future that expands our imagination to better/more inclusive experience in which women bodies are healed, resituated, and un-objectified.

These projects are practical and poetic examples of the kind of present, future, past, and present that I want to imagine for the world we live in. A future for us and by us.

For more information please see: https://schloss-post.com/overview/web-residencies/

December 13, 2014

AP
ART Project (2015)

AP<P>ART Project Dates (IRAN- In conjunction with Limited Access Festival),

Curated by Morehshin Allahyari and Myriam Vanneschi:

http://limitedaccessfestival.com/

Exhibition in Shiraz: December 12-17 —–> Dar al Hokoomeh at shiraz Artist’s Gallery

Panel in Shiraz: December 14 —–> Dar al Hokoomeh at shiraz Artist’s Gallery

http://daralhokoomeh.com/

Exhibition and Workshop in Tehran: December 19-24 —–> Darbast Platform

A prominent dialogue in computation within the last decade has been the mobile platform. Artists have been re-purposing software and apps to create a critical visual language that didn’t exist before. The use of apps in different cultural contexts and with access to certain technologies creates a technological aesthetic that is glocal (local + global). In the predominantly ‘Western’ industry of mobile apps and phone development, the technological and cultural adoption of these technologies are re-defined and mutated by different regions around the world. The AP<P>ART project reflects on these ideas and the interplay of mobile apps and visual language within cultural, social, and economic boundaries of regions; exploring how artists from different parts of the world use phone apps to push the possibilities and limitations of art and technology.

The AP<P>ART project includes two exhibitions and a series of panels and workshops in Tehran and Shiraz to establish a rarely attentive conversation among the artists in global north and Iran. Thinking about both the digital gap and continuity of technology and how users and eventually artists approach and shape the social and cultural aspects of tech, geopolitics and aesthetics.

Participating Artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Anthony Antonellis, Amirali Ghasemi, Mohsen Hazrati, Anahita Hekmat, Claudia Maté, Kimmo Modig, Mani Nilchiani, Eva Papamargariti, Yoshi Sodeoka, Angela Washko.

Workshop by: Anthony Antonellis and Pussykrew

APPART PROJECT- Poster

APPART PROJECT- Exhibition in Shiraz

August 14, 2014

#AsYouScrollDown (2014)

Morehshin Allahyari’s record store, #AsYouScrollDown is a digital and analogue archive; 100 tweets and series of images are gathered to re-visit the 2009-2010 protests in Iran known as the Green Movement. The record is comprised of messages extracted via Twitter published during the Green Revolution. We hear a stoic, robotic voice, reading aloud the frustrated and committed musings of an affected youth launched into rebellion by the corrupt actions of the Iranian government. The voices clamber on top of one another, and then retreat, twisting into a cacophony not unlike the incendiary energy of a radical revolution. Offset by the swirling undercurrent of ambient drones these tweets encapsulate the unheard dispatches of a voiceless majority during tumultuous times of political upheaval.*

*part of this description is take from Semigloss magazine’s editorial text written by Editor-in-Chief, Sally Glass.

Morehshin Allahyari – #AsYouScrollDown

#AsYouScrollDown, Theory of Survival, Southern Exposure Gallery, 2014.

*commissioned by Southern Exposure gallery for the “Theory of Survival: Fabrications” exhibition curated by Taraneh Hemmami.

View the Exhibition Website

May 22, 2014

بیت بر ثانیه – Bitrates (2014)

View the Bitrates Catalogue

View the GIFbites Website

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 – Bitrates

February 2, 2014

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

Morehshin Allahyari – Like Pearls

Installation Shots

Morehshin Allahyari – Like Pearls – Installation Shot

February 1, 2014

Dark Matter (2014)

Dark Matter is a series of combined, sculptural objects modeled in Maya and 3D printed to form humorous juxtapositions.; The objects chosen for the first series are the objects/things that are banned or un-welcome in Iran by the government. The objects that in many other countries people use or own freely but under Iranian government laws (for several reasons) are forbidden or discouraged to use. Owning some of these objects/things (dog, dildo, gun, neck tie, satellite dish, etc.) means going to jail, or getting a fine, or constantly being under the risk of getting arrested or bothered by the moral police. By printing and bringing the virtual 3D into physical existence, I want to simultaneously resist and bring awareness about the power that constantly threatens, discourages, and actively works against the ownership of these items in Iran. No matter how functional, through 3D printing, I am able to re-create and archive a collection of forbidden objects. In a way, the sculptural objects serve as a documentation of lives (my own life included) lived under oppressions and dictatorship. This is the documentation of a history full of red lines drawn in the most private aspect of one’s life.

What will happen when you re-contextualize the forbidden/banned/taboos? Could inserting the sculptures into another time and space change our relationship to these objects and challenge us to enter an historical dimension of the work? In other words, through positioning the tabooed I want to re-emphasize the dramatic and ironic aspect of forbidden; When looking back in twenty years, how would it feel to re-visit this collection?

Photos by Mario Gallucci

Dark Matter: #barbie #vhs

Dark Matter: #buddha #simpson

Dark Matter: #pig #gun