Category Archives: Six Pillars to Persia

Six Pillars to Persia. You can subscribe to this podcast channel at this address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/sixpillars

The Art of Improvisation

Cousins Adib (UK) and Mehdi Rostami (Iran) take the closeness of their family ties into the realm of improvisation, where trust and understanding between musicians is paramount to success. Prior to a London performance we talk to them in the studio about the preparatory process for an improvising musician, the instruments they play – the relatively new shurangiz –  and their ambitions for the future of their duo, split as they are between Iran and UK.

We sample some of their sublime music in the show, but nothing can compare to a live performance where the players literally take you on the ‘journey’ with them. Buy the CD here.

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Six Pillars – Crossroads of the Ancient World

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A personal tour of the British Museum’s major show in 2011 on Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World. This awesome and massively educative exhibition is brought to us thanks to the amazing bravery of a few men who took care of these objects in great secrecy and at great personal risk at the brink of two decades of civil war, strategic iconoclastic decimation and lawless looting.

Dr. St John Simpson is an archeologist and a curator at The British Museum and speaks here about the exhibition as a whole and Afghanistan’s place on the Silk Road where caravans from from Europe, China, India and Central Asia traveled back and forth. He guides us through the show and discusses details about several of the objects, of which his favourite is the fish-shaped drinking vessel pictured here.

This show was produced by Fari Bradley and originally broadcast May 2011.

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Six Pillars – Women and Sex in Iran

Fari Bradley talks to Dr Pari Esfandiari PHD about her website Irandokht, one of the 34 websites showcased by UNESCO. The website creates dialogue and space for expression for Iranian women all over the world and is a resounding success.

Dr Esfandiari also co-wrote a 7 page article in Playboy Magazine in 2007 about an erotic tape that made millions on the blackmarket, highlighting what it tells us about attitudes to women and sex in Iran today.

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Six Pillars – Slavs, Pistons and a City of Leaves

Interviews recorded in UAE with artist Bahar Behbahani, the Slavs and Tatars collective and tracks from the new album by singer Sussan Deyhim. The film by Behbahani at Sharjah Biennial involved a collaboration across the Caspian sea while the installation by the Slavs and Tatars created the setting for ‘Friendship of Nations’, a work looking at the revolutionary potential of crafts and folklore behind the ideology of two key modern movements: the Islamic Revolution of ’79 and Poland’s Trade Union movement of the 1980s. Sussan Deyhim has been played on the show since 2005, her new album City of Leaves includes collaborations with Richard Horowitz and DJ Spooky.

 

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Six Pillars – Entee aka Sarmastian

Our interview with new producer Entee aka Sarmastian, who visited the studios in July 2011. Here we sample some of his tracks and detail the rap/singing/remix competition open until August for any budding musicians out there who want some air time on 104.4FM

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Six Pillars – A Lebanese State of Mind

Curator of the 2010 Lebanon Pavilion at Venice Biennial, writer and curator Georges Rabbath lays out ‘A Plot for A Biennial’, an interactive happening following Lebanon’s official retraction from the Venice Biennial, 11.

At the Sharjah Art Foundation, Georges explains how T H E S T A T E O F M I N D project at this year’s biennial will make a transferable collection of artworks for any place where the world of art has become, he quotes ‘a zoo’.

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Six Pillars – Poland 3 Iran 2

A lively (and long!) chat with Mehrdad Seyf, founder of 30 Bird Productions, UK’s leading Anglo-Iranian theatre company. Fari met with Mehrdad at the beginning of his latest tour: Poland 3 – Iran 2, a multimedia piece performed in pubs with audience interaction and involving a sculpture piece containing a toilet and a toy train.

From Edinburgh to Poland (at the Teatromania Festival), the performers will be celebrating the story of the Pole-Irani football match that made history and the deeper historical and heartfelt relationship between the two peoples. We talk theatrics, compassion and interactive installations (the next piece by 30 Bird).

 

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Six Pillars – Wael Shawky

The Path To Cairo – Shawky

Ahead of his forthcoming talk at Delfina Foundation we’ve pulled out some audio from Emirates March Meeting 2011 where Wael presented his work on the crusades from an eastern perspective, as depicted through marionettes on film. One part of the quartet of film retraces events unfolding in the four years between (1096-1099) and which played a key role in subsequent historical developments, shaking to the core the Arab world and its relations with the West. Shawky was somehow given permission to use 200-year-old marionettes from the Lupi collection in Turin and was inspired by The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf, written in 1986. The book by Maalouf, a Lebanese writer, examines the historical points of the Crusades by going back to Arab historians and their writings, most of which have never been considered by historians in the West, although Maalouf does also reference some of the most acknowledged Western sources and studies and aim to give, finally, a balanced view to this too-long-one-sided episode in the history of humankind. Wael lives and work in Egypt.

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Six Pillars – Nobel Peace Prize Winner: Shirin Ebadi

Dr Shirin Ebadi, the First Iranian woman, indeed Middle Eastern woman, to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, spoke at SOAS on 2 February 2011 on ‘The Role of Women in Promoting Peace in the Middle East’.

Here she discusses the women’s movement in Iran and the difficulties she herself has faced in standing up for human rights in Iran.

This was originally broadcast on Six Pillars to Persia as part of a longer show, on Resonance 104.4fm.

Thanks to Marina Khatibi and Tom the engineer.

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Six Pillars – Pearls on the Ocean Floor

This Torture
Why should we tell you our love stories
when you spill them together like blood in the dirt?

Love is a pearl lost on the ocean floor,
…or a fire we can’t see,
but how does saying that
push us through the top of the head into
the light above the head?

Love is not
an iron pot, so this boiling energy
won’t help.

Soul, heart, self.

Beyond and within those
is one saying,
How long before
I’m free of this torture!

(by Hafez, C14th)

American director Robert Adanto visits the UK while making his new film. Pearls on the Ocean Floor is a documentary looking at Iranian women artists, born both before and after the revolution, inside and outside of Iran. The narrative is made up of images by the featured artists and other female Iranian artists, and the women speaking to the camera, which affords the film a certain honesty and directness.

The film is screening at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Russell Square with a panel discussion on March 7th 2011, 7-9pm, all welcome.

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