I used the opportunity of this travel award to visit a number of these abandoned Iranian properties in Washington D.C including the [former] Residence of the Iranian Minister of Cultural Affairs, (today an empty grass area) and the [former] Residence of Iranian Military Attaché with a basketball pole and a “Caution: Children At Play!” sign in its backyard. Peeking through the randomly covered dusty windows of the buildings I tried hard to close my ears on the sound of sirens, helicopters and cars coming from the Embassy Row’s main street, one out of every couple of which I was sure was an FBI patrol. My mind was empty as my body floated around in the in-betweenness of this space, my distorted body emerging among the reflected foliage of the trees in the garden surrounding the building… this mark that is abandoned to ruin while being taken care of, occupied and evacuated, marked and erased, exiled and house arrested at the same time. I searched through the ruins and found a tiny blue tile, sound and “whole”.
--J.M. COETZEE, Waiting for the Barbarians
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• Neely Macomber Travel Award
Works by Gelare Khoshgozaran
“Two Feet in the Air”
Performed at the Museum of Modern Arts, New York, January 2011
Music: My Girls from the album Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective
Port | MAN | toe is an ongoing new project by Los Angeles based Iranian artist, Gelare Khoshgozaran. The project involves an sporadic online cataloging of still images selected from the Iranian pop music videos mostly made between the early 70’s and late 90’s. Part of these music videos are considered “pre-revolutionary”, created and distributed in Iran, while others are “post-revolutionary”, made by the notorious diasporic community of Iranians in Los Angeles, usually referred to as “Tehrangeles”—a portmanteau word, made out of the most celebrated marriage of “Tehran” and “Los Angeles”.
In my retrospective view of this collage of misogyny, kitsch aesthetics, over objectification of women, visual usages of language, physical presence of musical instruments with no audible index in the sound of the music, levity and dance; through the abstraction of a (paused) moment, a “frame” singled out of the stream of the imagery of a pop music video emerges a hole through which I might be able to enter my way into this word that we would curiously refer to as “culture”.
Over a trial & error it occurred to me that if “trial” lends its “t” to error, our expenditure becomes “terror”.
“Nostalgia for the Past I Have Never Had”, my short writeup on Shirin Neshat is now available on my blog. Below is an excerpt:
“According to Neshat, her frustration with the falseness of the image of Iranian women in the Western mind has caused her to dedicate a major part of her practice to a “criticism” of this image. However, what artists such as Neshat and her followers simply take for granted is that the image that the West has of the Iranian identity is not one that is immediate, neutral and organically formed—The roots and origins of this image and the way that it has been formed, communicated and received throughout the years is one that deserves its own respective in-depth study. The question at hand is as proposed substitutes for this stereotypical image of the “Oriental Woman” in the realm of the Aesthetics, what other aspects of this identity do Neshat’s images reveal, and to what extent do they actually challenge and criticize this cliché that she claims they are disapproving of?” [Read on here.]
“PDF” is a single page example of phrases that can potentially be abbreviated as PDF. The condition of semantic satiation that is caused by the repetitive use of abbreviations is a form of undoing of the structure of letters themselves; elements that, put together are supposed to make words that function as a signifiers that generate meaning.
Submitted to All the Guns and White Flags’ Subscription PDF Release & Party.
WHY | digital slideshow (2010)
Why is slideshow that comprises of 260 slides. Each slide is a blank page with the question(s) most frequently asked about a specific country beginning with the word WHY by the Google Search Engine users. All 255 countries’ names were typed in Google search bar following the word Why and the autocomplete results were screen captured.
