The 12th Annual of Persbook’s Contemporary Art

Body-Weaving

A Curatorial Project

by Neda Darzi & Reza Monjezi

The Annual of Persbook’s Contemporary Art issues their public statement about their 12th event for the purpose of contemporary artists’ synergy, among the awareness of Iran society’s existing conditions, and also for the long-term aims commencing from the previous events concerning Iran’s ecology and society.

Artists:

Aida Alibakhsh, Ebrahim Advay, Najmeh Amini, Mojdeh Atrak,  Mansooreh Bagharaee, Katayoun Bahrami, Farzin Hedayatzadeh,  Mahmoud Maktabi, Sara Sasani, Aniseh Salehnia, Nasrin Shahbeigy, Hamideh Sobhani, Ismail Ghanbari, Zahra Nikooray, Shiva Nooran

The Perspective:

Persbook intends to play role in the meaning creation at the time the concepts such as lack and absence are inevitably felt in all life levels of humans. Additionally, in honor of Iran’s current civil movements and for constructing a modern sociocultural system, we hope to take actions for demonstrating the needs of artists’ community or displaying Iran’s contemporary art. In the previous annual events of Persbook’s Contemporary Art, the participative trends, artistic coordination, women’s handicrafts, environmental art, site-specific works, and decentralization have attentively achieved superior status. On the other hand, what is in attentiveness and under scrutiny in the contemporary and present Iran more than ever is artivism with distinct readings in the context of contemporary art and social art. This appropriate art attempts sometimes to represent achievements, however modest and tangible, and to take a type of functionalism into consideration of the artistic discourse. It can further be displayed in the public art: An observable and accessible art in the public space (or) for people in general terms. Indeed, this art pursues influence of the visual matter on general discourse. It can be utilized in the fixed elements of urban places or old buildings’ construction. Additionally, it can become a non-stationary project such as artistic decorations and events and body art. Therefore, the artists having environmental and social concerns can broadly enjoy citizens’ participation and coordination of artists outside of galleries and museums. Since the perspective has been primarily moved away from the ultimate product (the artistic reification) in the art to the works creation process, the artist attendance beside participants has been viewed as a significant determinant, contributing to universal training and awareness of environmental warnings, and cultural functions. We attempt to pursue artivism through interpersonal relations for representing a kind of social aesthetics.

For the purpose of creating an interactive context and with regard to social changes and developments, the following questions are crucial: How can we narrate our time for the next generations through activism and culturalization? How can the pioneer artist (or critics) broadly prevent or recreate a situation? and What is the duty of artist on the society’s current changes from an activism perspective? The 12th annual of Persbook provides a dialectic forum for the artists’ viewpoint in these regards.

The 12th annual was inspired by one of previous projects. That was an expectant indication of a recreating evolution at the base of convergence and comradeship among the Iranian artists’ community. Blood Vessel was the project with cooperation of artists and curatorship of Neda Darzi in the annual of Persbook in 2017. This environmental project was a metaphor of a flowing artery throbbing on the desert’s dry land by using fibers and the body of artists. There, the artists turned Blood Vessel into a site-specific work along each other’s continuum and/or in the interaction with traditional adobe buildings. Now, we intend to broadly continue this movement with the participation and coordination of artists, through site-specific art, and with the access of artists to their ecology regardless of the probable references to the other artistic creations of the event. The studies of contemporary ecologist and the environmental activist Suzanne Simard are guidance as to our perspective. Her findings in Canada forests show spectacular results about trees’ distant communication with each other. She narrates the balanced and complicated social life of trees. The forest trees enjoy an underground network for exchange of information and energy and their close interactions begin through focal (hub) trees that usually have better access to sunlight and therefore can do much more photosynthesis and can produce glucose more than their need. Hub trees share water and nutrients through underground fungal networks and interconnected roots. Also, when a tree is threatened, it sends warning alerts to other trees and strongly influences them. This green symbiotic and constructive relationship between fungus and rootage can be viewed as a metaphor of blood vessel gathering the artists being influenced by fundamentalist and eerie happenings. it can contribute to the light opening or utter the loud cry of an artery.

First Part: Rootage

The contemporary artists have been ever pursuing fine arts recreation and derivation from the traditional art. Rootage in environment in the form of decoration or through the fabric art approach to designs being similar to science and environment is the point of linkage between creativity  and female art. Also, use of recycled materials in fabric art offers a context for creation of temporary artistic and site-specific works in the environmental art. This broadness and rootage begins by examining and manipulating the female acts and continue by expansion of new concepts in arts, social intersectionality, and rootage of the human groups and interpersonal interactions.

Second Part: Broad Body

We should know that bodies are not the things that can be conceptualized by us. Rather, the bodies are themselves the meaning. Can we regard the physical presentation of concepts and objectives through the artist body as the indication of their contemporary life information and message? Can the body become the inception of attributes such as wounded, distressing, and bulky? As concerns the artist intervention in the discourse relating to these questions and regardless of the what and the how of responses, we hope this event becomes an opportunity for the respective social and active relations. At the time of intervention in, confinement of, and domination on bodies, the broad social body should be necessarily discussed. When artists utilize their body due to their influence from environment and society, these kinds of approaches strengthen enthusiasm for collective propositions (beside the body individuality) i.e. interconnected or separate acting and protesting bodies affected by identical pains and events. In this regard, the concepts such as the artist’s body broadness from a phenomenological viewpoint in the contemporary art contribute to creation of ontological and philosophical works.

The Event Holding Method:

The artists’ works will be performed, produced, or installed with respect to site-specific rules or the possibility of their access to their concerned ecology and place (outside of the gallery) and the documentation will be on release through videos, photos, and texts via virtual platforms and the media of Persbook’s Annual Contemporary art. The book of artists’ studies and works relating to the 12th annual will also be on release. The online talk with artists about the what and the how of works creation will be of the other programs of Persbook’s Annual Contemporary art. The works can be sold after the communication with the artist, the project’s financial supporters, or the independent buyers in the context of the Persbook audience community interactions.

The 12th Annual Schedule of Persbook’s Contemporary Art

June of 2023