Dustopedia (Ghobar-Nameh) is on-going research and archive curatorial project carried out by New Media Society in response to an invitation by Anna Ptak, a curator based in Warsaw, and it was meant to be exhibited in Warsaw in 2015 along with the project DUST/KURZ/غبار. It is an encyclopedia around the theme of dust, bringing together its appearance and reappearances through various media such as text, moving images, and found materials.///
Due to some problems and complications, Dustopedia wasn’t released during the exhibition, and the team decided to continue the project on their own and present it when another opportunity presented itself in Iran. Meanwhile, the archive was growing in many directions, and finally, in early 2018, the New Media Society decided to dedicate its project space to Dustopedia for two months starting in April. The project consists of ever-changing wall installation, a study room, and a screening area for talks and presentations.
Moving Dust brings together a series of videos from the Parking Video Library revolving around the representation of dust in moving images in the works of artists and filmmakers. Moving Dust features works by Anahita Hekmat, Arash Khosronejad, Arash Fesharaki, Saman Khosravi, Nazgol Emami, Ali Momeni, Minou Iranpour, Amirali Mohebbinejad, Aria Farajnejad, Jaleh Nesari, Tessa Knapp and Bahram Beyzai.
Curator: Amirali Ghasemi / Parking Video Library

On Moving Dust
The program starts with a TV glitch familiar to many Iranians living inside the country, followed by free-wheeling cameras, concerned souls, onlookers, and workers moving “Dust.”

In Keanser (Cancer), Arash Khosronejad, a musician, and a digital-artist uses the low-quality signals on satellite television to create a suspense-scape where a floating fog of noise leaves no room for escape from the immersive darkness. There have been speculations about the waves which are sent to interfere with satellite signals in Iran and some strongly believe that they are causing cancer in people.

Ali Momeni’s Smoke and Hot Air which was created in collaboration with Robin Mandel takes on the ever-increasing threats against Iran. The machine is created to pick up news featuring sentences that include “attack Iran” that are scavenged from Google News and spoken using a text-to-speech synthesizer. The voice is then picked up by a microphone, analyzed, and translated into rhythmically corresponding smoke rings from a quartet of smoke ring makers. While signaling fear, translated on the spot from threats spread worldwide into identical smoke rings coming out of an unstoppable machine, the room is gradually filled with smoke as the tension rises. This 2008 piece, is still valid and pertinent ten years later where an uncertain shadow is hanging over us all.

In “The End of the World is …”, Mohebbinejad tries to recreate a void, juxtaposing the dialogues from the film Naked – directed by Mike Leigh – with images of floating dust particles, unknown shimmering creatures as he puts it, “coming into being and passing away.” This dystopian piece uses minimum requirements to depict the moment dust particles, their eminent presence in every space, are activated by a ray of light and then shut down every other second.

Minou Iranpour’s Bein is an abstract journey, an alienated landscape based on her life experiences as she puts it, Bein is something happening “in between.” Abstract images shot with a digital camera, do not leave much to interpretation while the sepia tone applied on the film, fades traces of any familiar scene which can lead to any possible guess. Iranpour wants the viewer to stay with her on this short journey.

Anahita Hekmat has two pieces in Moving Dust: Arg-e-Bam (CITADELLE), revisits the aftermath of a 6.6 earthquake in the city of Bam, in the Kerman province of southeastern Iran, which destroyed Arg-e Bam, the world’s largest adobe structure, dating back to at least 500 B.C. The trace, which was made a year before, follows a journey to Shahda, a village near Yazd, which is one of the last places to resist the encounter between Islam and Zoroastrianism in Iran. Hekmat’s camera often follows a historic trail and arrives at locations that have been collecting dust for a long time like a wind, even when it’s too late. Jaleh Nesari’s the dust of the beloved path revolves around various geopolitical interpretations of dust mixing with poesy and image.

There are three pieces in Moving Dust, featuring workers; all busy demolishing and building Tehran’s cityscape. Their fragile condition and that of their working conditions are reflected in three fragmented perspectives from documentary cameras to Bahram Beizai’s scene from his nationally acclaimed feature film “Killing the Mad Dogs,” which portrays Golrokh Kamali’s struggle in the concrete jungle of post-war Tehran. The workers’ influx as their employers’ money in Iranian Rial bills being thrown in the air by Golrokh, sends mixed signals of how Beyzai depicts them transforming from obedient servants to greedy hooligans, raiding their bosses’ possessions. Arash Fesharaki’s sunset landscape is as bitter as it is stunning as the sun goes down and workers are destroying the villa which they are standing on to make space for a tower obscuring the same view. And finally, in Saman Khosravi’s The Destructed Ones, as the artist wakes up to witness the night shift of destruction next door he writes: “When an old building in front of my work studio was being demolished I started shooting its gradual disappearance, but while I was recording the demolition, the construction workers and their miserable conditions caught my attention and instinctively I got my camera focused on them instead.”

As the program reaches the end and is about to be looped soon, we reach the final piece by Nazgol Emami, a viral soundscape described by her, created around and named after, a computer virus called “you are an idiot".