10-21 December 2019
Dance Dance Dance is an exhibition which culturally and politically revaluates public perception of gesture and dance as bodily social experiences in Iran. Taking its name from a 1960s Iranian garage band, Dance Dance Dance presents works by artists including: Hengameh Golestan, Khosrow Hassanzadeh, Sohrab Kashani, Ardeshir Mohasses, Fardid Khadem, Malekeh Nayiny, Mohammad Shirvani, Jinoos Taghizadeh, Sadegh Tirafkan, and Mitra Ziaei Kia & Maryam B. Nesami. The exhibition is partially sponsored by the The Prix Off F.P.Journe, which rewards the best institutional curated exhibition at artmonte-carlo. The Prix Off 2017 was awarded to Magic of Persia for the exhibition “Contemporary Iran” curated by Fereshte Moosavi. Financed by F.P.Journe, this Prize allowed the winner to develop and sustain this project in London.
Hengameh Golestan is a documentary photographer. Her work spans forty years (between 1970 and 2000) and constitutes a highly original and unique visual document of late twentieth century life in Iran. Golestan’s lens acts as a loyal witness to the everyday realities of individuals and communities and intimate environments that are often less visible, opening up spaces for citizens to see each other. Witnessed and documented through a humanistic construction of relations within quotidian life, Golestan’s photographs constitute a valuable social record, with a particular focus on women, children and families, as well as the times, across a period of momentous historical and cultural transformation.
Khosrow Hassanzadeh is a multimedia artist based in Tehran whose work deals with politically and socially complex issues in contemporary Iran. Through his work Hassanzadeh brings under scrutiny not only Islamic iconography and gender politics, but also the reductive stereotypes used by the West to brand Muslims as terrorists.
Sohrab Kashani is an interdisciplinary artist, art curator and writer based in Tehran. He is the founding director of Sazmanab, a not-for-profit curatorial platform based in Tehran. Super Sohrab is the alter-ego of Kashani whose practice focuses on failure and is driven by the need to fix local and global problems while documenting the process through, film, video, comic and text.
Ardeshir Mohasses was an illustrator, cartoonist and painter who began his work at the Towfiq, a widely-read satirical journal in 1960s. As a man of sharp and angry perception his works show decapitating bodies twisted into peculiar shapes to expose the bitter truth that lies under the surface of everyday life.
Fardid Khadem is a photographer, archivist and researcher based in Tehran. Khadem explores archive as a space for hidden, mysterious, narrational, memorial and historical events. Through a series of photographs chosen from a family archive, taken by two of his uncles, Farrokh and Nooredin, Khadem sets to rescue the suspended histories of individual experiences in order to shed lights on a series of shared social knowledges.
Malekeh Nayiny lives and works in Paris. Her artistic practice mostly questions the artificial binary between the staged and the documentary photography while exploring the implications of power of ‘representation’ and the reminiscence of the self and society.
Mohammad Shirvani is an independent film-maker based in Tehran. His films such as The Circle (1999), The Candidate (2000), President Mir Qanbar (2006), and Fat Shaker (2013), have been screened in more than 500 international events where he won many prices, such as; Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Locarno, Toronto, Tribeca and Busan. Since 2012 he has been running “Alternative Cinema Workshop” in Iran.
Jinoos Taghizadeh is a multidisciplinary performance artist based in Tehran. Her practice travels through a variety of media including painting, collage, video and performance and deals with the problematic construction of collective identities in contemporary Iran.
Sadegh Tirafkan was an Iraqi born artist based between Tehran and Toronto. Tirafkan’s practice explores the problematics of modern identity, notion of the self and the individual psyche while placing them in relationship with religious sites, instructive forms and ritual practices. His works investigate the role of artist and their limits within different extents of the Islamic society while proposes a performative act within those situations as an emancipatory solution.
Mitra Ziaei Kia & Maryam B. Nesami are independent performance artists and choreographers based in Tehran. Ziaei Kia is the co-founder of Māha Dance Projects which deals with the body as a scene of accidents; birth, life & death. Ziaei Kia and Nesami choose various public spaces in Tehran as their stage to distract male gaze of the city-audience by suggesting eccentric acts of a female body.
Fereshte Moosavi, is an independent curator and educator based in London. She holds a PhD under the Curatorial/Knowledge programme at Goldsmiths University of London. Her thesis entitled Studying Curatorial-Abilities; Environmenting, Improvising, & Inhabiting State of Affairs proposes a set of abilities that has the potential to resituate curatorial thinking and expand practices of curation as creative processes. Moosavi has worked for over seven years (April 2011- September 2018) as the art director and curator of the MOP Foundation in London and is the founder of Curatorial in Other Words, a research-based project initiated in 2015 in Tehran.
Magic of Persia is a non-profit organisation based in London that provides educational and representational supoort for Iranian artists. Established in 2004, MOP Foundation pioneers Iranian art and culture to a global audience through its dedicated programme of modern and contemporary Iranian art exhibitions, music, media, academia and partnerships with leading international institutions.
This project is partially sponsored by The Prix Off F.P.Journe, which rewards the best institutional curated exhibition at artmonte-carlo. The Prix Off 2017 was awarded to Magic of Persia for the exhibition “Contemporary Iran” curated by Fereshte Moosavi. Financed by F.P.Journe, this Prize will allow the winner to develop and sustain an upcoming project in London.
