Quarterly

Spring 2012 | ArteZine

Biographies

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Barbad Golshiri is an artist, curator, and critic who was born and lives in Tehran. He is also translator and editor of Samuel Beckett’s works in Persian. Some of his participations include: Elephant in the Dark, curated by Amirali Ghasemi, Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi, 2012; Cura; The Rise and Fall of Aplasticism curated by Katya Krylova, 4th Moscow Biennial; And I Regurgitate and I Gulp it Down, Aaran Art Gallery, Tehran (solo exhibition 2011); The Language Show, Vivid, Birmingham, 2010; Nothing Is Left to Tell, Thomas Erben Gallery, NY (solo exhibition 2010); Iran, New Voices, (Barbican Centre, 2008); Medium Religion, ZKM, Karlsruhe (curated by Boris Groys and Peter Weibel 2009); Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East, Saatchi Gallery, London, (2009); The First Contemporary Art Biennial of Thessaloniki’ (curated by Syrago Tsiara and Areti Leopoulou, Archeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Greece, (2007); The 5th Gyumri International Biennial (curated by Arpine Tokmajian, Gyumri, Armenia, 2006); and Too Much Pollution to Demonstrate: Soft Guerrillas in Tehran’s Contemporary Art Scene, curated by Amiel Grumberg, Apex Art, New York, 2005.

Media Farzin is a New York-based critic and art historian, and PhD candidate at the City University of New York. Her research looks at language-based art in the 1970s in relation to performance. She received her BFA in Painting from Tehran University, and an MA in Curatorial Studies from Columbia University. She was curator, with Laleh Khorramian, of Turning Points (Neiman Gallery, 2004), and with Jon Hendricks and Marianne Bech, of Fluxus Scores and Instructions (Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde, 2008). An ongoing art project with artist Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, on cultural diplomacy and its modernist artifacts, was shown at the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011). She is the author of monographic essays on Anton Vidokle, Pouran Jinchi, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfamaian and Kamrooz Aram. She was a contributor to TehranAvenue.com in 2003-04, and has more recently written for Bidoun, Canvas, Afterimage and Art-Agenda online. She is a lecturer at the City College of New York, and instructor at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Sohrab Kashani is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator based in Tehran. Kashani is the founding director and the curator of Sazmanab Project, a non-profit space in Tehran where he organizes exhibitions and events and hosts residencies for emerging and established international artists and curators. He currently works as a curator at Mohsen Gallery, Tehran.

Sohrab Mahdavi is co-founder and editor of the bilingual magazine, TehranAvenue.Mahdavi grew up in Tehran, and his last high school year coincided with the Iranian revolution of 1979. For the next 11 years he lived in the USA, where he grappled with the political realities of exile. When he returned to Tehran, the city was not the one which he had left. The City is the converging point of dislocation. It is where its “escape to” and “flight from” coexist in yin-yang dichotomy. It provides respite from at the same time that it invites a search for identity. It is where collectivism has become individualized and individualism communalized.The City has further been transformed along virtual lines. A Tehrani in Berlin can remain a Tehrani in her virtual space. Conversely, his friend in Tehran can escape from the confines of the City and live in an imaginary landscape. The Internet is the battleground of presence and absence. TehranAvenue is the place where these lines of intensity crisscross. What does it mean to live in a Third World city? Where are the lines that trace a cyber-city?

Negar Mottahedeh is Associate Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University currently teaching as Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. Her work has been published in Camera Obscura, Signs, Iranian Studies, Radical History Review, MERIP, The Drama Review, Early Popular Visual Culture, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In 2008, Duke University Press published her book on Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema entitled Displaced Allegories. Her first book, Representing the Unpresentable, on visual history and reform in Iran from the 19th century to the present was published in 2008 by Syracuse University Press. A perceptive theorist of Iranian visual culture, Professor Mottahedeh writes and speaks about culture, innovation and digital technologies. Her current research and writing on the uses of social media in uprisings for civil liberties and equality around the world, supplement her engagement as blogger and activist. She tweets as negaratduke.

Anahita Razmi is a video and performance artist based in Stuttgart. Working within the tradition of appropriation and reenactment, Razmi detaches cultural symbols from their established meanings by employing them in unexpected situations and contexts. Within this, her work often builds up a relation to contemporary Iran. Recent solo and group shows include Videonale 13, Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany (2011); Division by Zero, Carbon12, Dubai (2011); Iran via Video Current, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York (2011); Make – Believe – Remake, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen, Germany (2011), The State: Social? Antisocial?, Traffic, Dubai (2011); Leinen Los!, Kunstverein Hannover (2010); Ikeallahu Akbar, Interventionsraum, Stuttgart (2010), Robberies, Kunstverein Das Weisse Haus, Wien (2010). In 2010 Razmi received a work stipend from the Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Germany for her work The Paykan Project; and in 2011 she was awarded The Emdash Award by the Frieze Foundation, London for her project Roof Piece Tehran.

Slavs & Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians, and Central Asians. Slavs and Tatars has published Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009); Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (onestar press, 2010); and Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would’ve, could’ve, should’ve (JRP-Ringier, 2011). Their work has been exhibited at the Frieze Sculpture Park, the 10th Sharjah, 8th Mercosul, and 3rd Thessaloniki Biennials. After devoting the past 5 years primarily to two cycles of work, namely, a celebration of complexity in the Caucasus (Kidnapping Mountains, Molla Nasreddin, Hymns of No Resistance) and the unlikely heritage between Poland and Iran (Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz, 79.89.09), Slavs and Tatars have begun work on their third cycle, The Faculty of Substitution, on mystical protest and the revolutionary role of the sacred and syncretic, for group exhibitions at the GfZK, Leipzig and the New Museum Triennial as well as solo engagements at Vienna Secession, MoMA, NY, and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

Sandra Skurvida is an independent curator and scholar based in New York City. Her curatorial practice has been determined by the specific socio-political conditions: OtherIS (2011-ongoing) is a platform for art production and exchange under the conditions of international embargo; Avant-Guide to NYC (apexart, 2009) addressed historical art referents in the present cityscape; Custom Car Commandos (Art in General, 2009) cross-sectioned the auto industry in crisis with the image industry; Soap Box Event by Pia Lindman (Federal Hall National Memorial, 2008) practiced performance of free speech; and numerous other projects since 1995, when she curated the Third Annual Exhibition of Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her scholarly work is focused on performance, socially engaged practices, and transmedia art; she is researching, writing, and lecturing on John Cage and his influences on current art practices. Skurvida is currently teaching at FIT-SUNY; she has taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Parsons The New School University; and MoMA, among other institutions.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer and critic, she lives and works in Beirut. She is a contributing editor for the magazine Bidoun, writes a column for Frieze, contributes regularly to Artforum, and covers contemporary art and culture for the Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star. As a journalist, she has published writing in The New York Times, The Times of London and The Village Voice, among many other publications. She was a 2007 fellow in the USC Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism Program, Los Angeles. As an essayist, she has written for Afterall and Art Journal, and contributed texts to numerous anthologies, monographs, and exhibition catalogs, including: The Future of Tradition – The Tradition of Future (2010); Untitled Tracks: On Alternative Music in Beirut (2009); Foreword, the catalogue accompanying Lebanon’s first and only national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Venice (2007); and Out of Beirut (2006).

 

 


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