When Legacies Become Debts – About The Series of Conversations
About the series of conversations in When Legacies Become Debts.
OPENING TALKS
From Debt to Dedication, From Performance to Perfume
Wednesday 23 January 2018, 7 PM
“How to pay your debt to the previous generation? Will you take on their pain? If so can you transform it? Perhaps into a body of abstractions with a different perfume.” Art critic and cultural theorist Jan Verwoert is in conversation with artist Ronak Moshtaghi.
OPENING TALKS
Inheriting Childhood
Saturday 26 January 2018, 7 PM
Fables are not childish romances, but rather childhood politics. For we enter language through fables collectivity, as a group of humans and non humans. And the wits and tricks are not just lessons, but a language of surviving for the oppressed. Writer Haytham El-Wardany is in conversation with curator Azar Mahmoudian about Kalila wa Dimna, and how could we learn from childhood.
BOOK LAUNCH AND TALK
Enghelab Street, A Revolution through Books: Iran 1979-1983 (2018)
Thursday 31 January 2018, 7 PM
Artist Hannah Darabi is in conversation with curator Catherine David, about her new book and archival research Enghelab Street, A Revolution through Books: Iran 1979–1983, presented at the exhibition.
SCREENING
Bazm-e-Razm (2017)
Wednesday 6 February 2018, 6:30 PM
Vahid Hosseini’s 90 minute documentary tells the tumultuous story of the Iranian music scene between 1979 and 1989, featuring extensive interviews with individuals involved in the scene.
TALK
We Have a Right in this House too
Wednesday 13 February 2018, 7 PM
Presenting an understudied chapter in the history of the international Left in Iran, architect and researcher Hamed Khosravi traces the multifaceted life of a couple, who through their foundation of the Women’s Association and the Association of Iranian Architects redefined the idea of domesticity in Iran. The talk addresses newly conceptualized domestic spaces in Tehran as spaces of resistance wherein class, gender, social and political conflicts are deployed.
SCREENING AND CONVERSATION
Nature Morte (2017)
Thursday 21 February 2018, 6 PM
Adopting a cross-referential approach towards the history of image-making, including Still Life (1974), a seminal work by the filmmaker Sohrab Shahid-Saless, Nature Morte unfolds in two episodes: “Daddy Sperm” and “Immortal”. Through a collaborative experience of filmmaking with his parents, Mamali Shafahi ushers them into his own queer world, and eventually pushing them to be reborn as new characters in a universe far from the everyday life of their peaceful retirement in the suburbs of Tehran.
Shafahi is in conversation with artist and writer Ashkan Sepahvand about the film.
CONVERSATION
Rebirth of Adab: Revisiting Persian Aesthetic Theories within the Materialist Realm
Thursday 28 February 2018, 7 PM
Artist Sam Samiee is in conversation with anthropologist Sumaya Kassamali about translating the modusoperandi of the Persian literary world into questions to be dealt with in the visual arts. The conversation attempts to revisit the notion of Adab as an ethical and aesthetic paradigm, and its currency within the contemporary art world.
CONVERSATION
Translation as a Prism: Diffracting Languages
Thursday 7 March 2018, 7 PM
How can legacies, ancestries and historical trajectories be re-configured, re-imagined and remembered in and through translation as a counter-practice of boundary-making? Poet and literary critic Khashayar Naderehvandi is in conversation with philosopher Lucie Mercier.
BOOK LAUNCH
Pocket Folklore
Thursday 14 March 2018, 7 PM
Shirin Sabahi is in conversation with Azar Mahmoudian about her recent publication, Pocket Folklore. The book concludes Sabahi’s long-term project around a sculpture by Noriyuki Haraguchi at TMOCA, which is presented in the exhibition.
CONVERSATION
CAD Conspiracy: Pattern Recognition in Contemporary Art
Tuesday 19 March 2018, 7 PM
Artists Bahar Noorizadeh and Mahan Moalemi expand on their collaborative work, in a discussion with theorist Suhail Malik about the purchase of automation and alienation on contemporary art aesthetics.
CONVERSATION
Eastoxification: An Introduction
Friday 22 March 2018, 7 PM
This lecture performance features the two members of Alphabet Collection (AC), Mohammad Salemy and Patrick Schabus, illustrating the role of liberal and leftist intellectuals from postwar period until present time, in confusing the popular and emancipatory aspects of political Islam with its more reactionary tendencies.
CONVERSATION
That Which Tomorrow Was Not: Legacies of an Anti-Western Revolution
Tuesday 26 March 2018, 7 PM
Filmmaker and cultural critic Hamed Yousefi is in conversation with theorist Sami Khatib to discuss the political legacy of anti-Western thought in Iran and beyond. Yousefi’s film The Fabulous Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid deals with an enigmatic figure who mobilized Heideggerian philosophy in his crusade to halt Western influence in the Islamic world.