Forever Under Construction

Just received the following:

Azad Gallery is pleased to present nonad (of nines and nomads), a solo exhibition by the Iran-based American artist Kristen Alvanson, opening Friday, May 23. In Alvanson’s first Tehran exhibition, a western artist reanimates her artistic experiments with an entirely new arsenal of conceptual and material resources.

Since leaving New York, Alvanson has explored the threefold of textiles, women, and the Middle East in all its formations, anomalies, enigmas, political speculations, and aesthetic conjectures. Her new work includes nomadic fabric chador (Persian veil) sculptures, abjad-9 drawings, and an animation from her Cosmic Drapery Project.

For the exhibition, Azad Gallery is transformed into a garden of hanging folds. Nine colorful chadors are hung throughout the gallery. As viewers weave through and interact with the installation, they discover implicit sociopolitical structures of these nomadic fabric sculptures as well as their nomadic persuasions in regard to art and creativity. At 350 cm x 190 cm, each chador contains nine panels, six made of different nomadic fabrics. The rest contain black fabric, the same fabric used for traditional back chadors.

On surrounding walls, the Abjad-9 drawings suggest collective shapes vaguely reminiscent of the patterns of traditional Islamic art. Drawn in Persian ink and calligraphic pen, the drawings reveal the affect space between women in veil or chador, and the forces, folds and movements between them. These elaborately nested structures include half-elliptical shapes, the shape of a Persian veil when fully spread out. These shapes represent women in chador as seen from above.

The animation ninefold is a further visualization of these complex, subterranean relationships and spaces. Like the chadors and the Abjad-9 drawings, it is structured by the number 9, standing for the occluded relations between textiles, women, and the Middle East. In the Middle Eastern occult, nine is the number of unceasing collectivity - worlds created through the hidden bonds of spells and collective tides.

Alvanson’s nomadic fabric chadors explore the interactions between black and nomadic fabrics. These include the differences and compatibilities between patterns, textures, and weight; explicit folding lines; and the distribution of sequins. The potentials inherent in each fabric emerge as islands of alliance or as folds of opposition between state and nomadic art in the Middle East.

Kristen Alvanson (born in 1969 in Minneapolis) lives and works in Shiraz, Iran. She attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York and holds a degree from Sarah Lawrence College. Alvanson has exhibited in shows in both the United States and the Middle East. She will be participating in the upcoming International Roaming Biennial of Tehran. Her writing and artworks have been published in Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development, New Humanist, Frozen Tears III and will be included in an upcoming issue of Cabinet magazine.

See also Lumpen orientalism

Previous posts: Kristen Alvanson, Lux

My mother’s family

Updating a family album

by Malekeh Nayini

Why this isn’t taught in schools?

After reading the history of the Germany in early 30s, “Italy in the ’20s, Russia in the ’30s, East Germany in the ’50s, Czechoslovakia in the ’60s, Pinochet’s coup in Chile in ’73, the crushing of the democracy movement in China at the end of the ’80s“, American author, Naomi Wolf says ” that there is a blueprint that would-be dictators always do the same ten things, whether they’re on the left or the right […]“

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
2. Create secret prisons where torture takes place.
3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.
5. Harass citizens’ groups.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention.
7. Target key individuals.
8. Control the press.
9. Treat all political dissents as traitors.
10. Suspend the rule of law.

In this article in The Guardian, the author develops her idea with a focus on her homeland although the model is universal.

Related posts at 99

Henry C. K. Liu is a regular contributor to Asia Times Online on economics and finance.

I enjoy reading C. K. Liu’s articles, although I don’t understand half of his financial jargon. What eases my way through his lengthy specialized writings is that the social, cultural, historical, even artistic and philosophical aspects are always included. That’s where I got some idea about the history of central banking, the Bretton Woods regime and its collapse in 1971, the fiat currency, the dollar hegemony, etc.

A few days ago I came across the following article: The Global Economy in Transition presented in a conference in 2003. Here is Henry C. K. Liu’s take on the “war on terrorism“:

“[…] The hollowing out of America’s manufacturing and digital sectors becomes a compelling rationale for US control of the world to protect its offshore sourcing. After all, wars have been fought to protect the supply of oil in places where nature has placed it; why should the United States not fight to protect where the “free” market puts its manufacturing and data processing? In this strategy, the US needs only two things: a powerful military with instant power-projection capability everywhere around the globe, and dollar hegemony to create dollars that can buy all the things that the world makes for export to the US. The British Empire was rationalized by the need of Britain to import food as domestic agriculture became crowded out by industry. Similarly, the US Empire will be rationalized by the need of the United States to import manufactured goods as domestic production is crowded out by financial services.

There are only two difficulties with this grand strategy: 1) to build the ideal empire, US workers will have to be retrained for the service sector and large numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers will fall through the cracks - and that creates problems in a democracy; and 2) the rest of the world is not stupid and may not take it lying down. So freedom and democracy at home will have to be modified in the name of homeland security and foreign resistance will have to be crushed in the name of freedom and democracy. The “war on terrorism” is tailor-made for this grand strategy.”

The complete Henry C. K. Liu, AToL
C. K. Liu’s website

A. Nadalian

Performance

Green Art
Green, Sometimes Gray Art

Arundhati Roy has released a new book. Read more
Here is a review and a link to an interview with the author

From Confronting empire: Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Previous post: Small Things

We have all seen this award wining photo. Here is a series of aerial photos of Iran by the same photographer: George Steinmetz

Most of the aerial photos were taken from the seat of the lightest powered aircraft in the world, a motorized paraglider.

Salt deserts of Iran, 2003

Summary of photos:

Islands surrounded by salt in Lake Tashk
Sun reflection on Lake Tashk
Greater flamingoes, Lake Tashk
Folded rocks of a salt dome, Dasht-e Kavir
Paragliding over salt domes of Dasht-e Kavir
Self portrait while paragliding over the salt domes of Dasht-e Kavir
Shore of salt lake, Dasht-e Kavir
Solitary rock with a tree growing out of it, Arsanjan
Tourists viewing Persepolis
Murals of religious leaders, Kerman
Fields irrigated by underground aqueducts, Torud
Women pound pomegranates into tangy syrup, Arsanjan
Sunrise in a camp of Khamseh nomads, near Persepolis
A network of ancient underground aqueducs, Mehriz
Aqueduct maintenance men, Mehriz
Cleaning out mineralized deposits from aqueduct, Mehriz
Wind tower, Kashan
Two weeks before the earthquake that leveled it, Arg-e Bam
Wind-eroded rocks, Dasht-e Lut

Cracked mud on a dry lake, Dasht-e Lut

Mobile sand dunes, Dasht-e Lut

Our military escort at sunrise, Dasht-e Lut

Military escort examines our motorized paragliders, Dasht-e Lut

Sedentary tent camp, Sistan-Baluchistan

Crescent-shaped earthen dams, Mesr

Salt works, Sistan-Baluchistan

Rain-eroded ridges, Makran Coast

See trailer

With the help of a Rising Voices microgrant, Shaghayegh Azimi will explain to Iranian filmmakers how they can use videoblogs to distribute their short films and documentaries to an international audience. Once the videos are available online, Azimi will also see to it that they are sub-titled and distributed widely via popular video-sharing networks.

Shaghayegh Azimi is an Iranian-American reporter and documentary filmmaker. Born in the United States, she grew up an equal amount of time in both the United States and Iran and says she spent a good deal of her formative years defending each of her two homes to the residents of the other. The major difference, she notes, is that while nearly all Iranians are informed about the latest cultural and political developments in the United States, many Americans can’t even locate Iran on a map.

If you wish you can share your comments and say what do you want to know about Iran.

See trailer and more about the project

Other videos at This Iranian American Life: Rosewater Wash and more

… in a kindergarten

Link via Balatarin

Not all that great

How World Bank policies led to famine in Haiti, The Real News

——————

Jeremy Seabrook, The Guardian

As if to demonstrate that poverty is now a residual issue in the world, the poor are being slowly eliminated from the imagery of the busy global media. […]

If they have not yet been completely eclipsed, at least their wellbeing is now entrusted to NGOs, charities and international institutions, far more dependable custodians of their welfare than any self-help, or organisation on their own behalf. “The poor” have become an object of piety in a secular world. Who does not strive to raise them out of their misery? Is that after all not the purpose of wealth-creation?

Window-dressing is perhaps the highest art in the culture of globalism. In spite of appearances, poverty exhibits a disagreeable tenacity in the world. Since its removal would be an arduous process, it is, perhaps, easier to obliterate the representation of the poor in the world’s media than to wipe out poverty.

It may also be that the media vanishing trick prefigures something far more sinister, preparatory, perhaps, to more material disappearances. For their persistent presence remains a spectre at the global feast. What an agreeable place the world is - or would be - without them: nothing to mar the smiling imagery of plenty, the abundance of the display window and the publicity machine, the shopping mall and the showroom, the wall-to-wall entertainment and TV channels of endless music and laughter.

There are daily intimations of a more brutal dematerialisation of the poor. Wholesale clearances of city slums intensify whenever some spectacular event is to be staged - Beijing has unceremoniously removed its urban poor for the Olympics. Delhi has been cleansing its slums in readiness for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Bengaluru is to become “slum-less” as a result of its “slum clearance with a mission” programme. On almost every map of the world’s major cities, the areas occupied by the urban poor appear as blank spaces, emblem of their future erasure.

[…] At least 140,000 farmers in India committed suicide between 1997 and 2007 […] “accidents of modernity”, people for whom nothing has replaced decaying structures of meaning. […]

[...] How simple for the state to shoot them down, and write off their no-account lives as an “encounter” with militants, ultras, extremists, and all the other inventive taxonomies devised to justify the elimination of those they have impoverished to the point of hopelessness.

Arundhati Roy sees preparations for a “genocide” against the poor […]

As if to support this grim scenario, the ghost of hunger is presently being invoked by the global information machines. […] The Malthusian insight, that no place is set at nature’s banquet for the poor, has been revised: no longer nature’s banquet, it is now a feast crafted by a global food manufacturing industry.

[…] In the perpetual artificial sunshine of the technosphere, within the global gated community in which all the inhabitants are rich, the poor have already ceased to exist. But it is one thing to banish them from the enchanted islands of plenty, that virtual reality of the fantasists of wealth, but quite another to erase them from a material world in which they remain an obdurate majority. Their refusal to go quietly into the oblivion for which they are apparently destined is likely to take unpredictable and malignant forms; since they are the footsoldiers of the militias, Maoists, mafiosi and militants who have flooded the spaces evacuated by governments for whom the poor no longer count. Read the article

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Pedestrian quotes Peter Ducker who explains the present trend:

“… we’ll plan for 8% of the world’s population … and, as if somehow, magically, the few NGOs … will take care of the remaining 92% …”

Along the Silk Route in Afghanistan by Fred Maroon

From Informed Comment: Global Affairs: Fashion shoots, Afghanistan 1968

Luke Powell another photographer who was attracted to Afghan culture, remembers the 70’s: “No motor vehicles, no power lines. Everything was homemade and everyone was happy and no one was hungry. It was the most beautiful place“. See previous post.

Click picture for a larger image

A Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School study: Mapping Iran’s online public: Politics and culture in the Persian blogosphere by John Kelly, Bruce Etling, Internet and Democracy

Iranian blogospher tests government’s limits, NYT

Bloggers in Iran push limits of government tolerance, IHT

Blogging in Iran: Politics & Poetry, Reuters

Blogging in Iran, Time