In the last few decades, the ongoing migration of people from Iran has increasingly foregrounded intractable philosophical questions concerning the complexities of “displacement” and “place”, inherent to which are notions of “national identity” and “home”. Neatly distanced academic reflections often reduce the Iranian migration story to measurable motivations and statistics, and disturbingly, do little to check associations between émigrés, their often invisible ties to Iran, and the liminal space we live in regardless of our geography./// In this exhibition, Ali Nassir aims to propose an alternative view, based on the belief that personal narrative and self-reflexive dialogue regarding art-making hold the potential to produce a deeper philosophical insight into the increasingly diasporic human condition, which is needed both to undo malicious stereotyping and to validate the contributions made by diasporic identities to the Iranian art scene. The exhibition engages five emerging Iranian artists living and working in three different countries, Donya H. Aalipour (b. 1995), Mahdad Alizadeh (b. 1993), Pegah Keshmirshekan (b. 1996), Iman Rezai (b. 1981), and M. Smart (b. 1998). Just as artworks act as invitations to enter into difficult, heterotopic spaces, the exhibition invites the audience into a self-reflective space that enacts the ambivalence and uncertainty at the beginning of a dialogue. The aim of this exhibition is not to offer neatly packaged questions or answers, but to open the spectator to an experience of the dialogical fissures, gaps, silences and contradictions that reveal the ambivalence of diaspora experiences in the moment of “being unspoken”.

Curator: Ali Nassir

Artists

• -  M Smart
• -  Donya H.Alipour
• -  Iman Rezaei
• -  Mahdad Alizadeh
• -  Pegah Keshmirshekan