Uk-based Iranian artist Alinah Azadeh discusses her massive installation ‘The Gifts’ at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, 2010 and how the process of binding in the work helped her when after losing her mother to the Asian Tsunami of 2004. This is our second interview with Azadeh who was commissioned to fill the Royal Festival Hall ballroom, Southbank with a large installation called The Bibliomancer’s Dream. New work by Azadeh will be on show during a Six Pillars exhibition at Hundred Years Gallery, London May 31st-June 16th more info on www.sixpillars.org For culture news and signposts, follow us on our mailing list or on Facebook www.facebook.com/SixPillarsToPersia
Tag Archives: Art
Six Pillars to Persia – Artist Koushna Navabi
Artist Koushna Navabi speaks at the opening of her solo show for Xerxes art gallery, London. Mediums and materials used ranged from cloth, to embroidery to paint to even a glove and topics range from Iranian past leaders to the chemical components of oil.
Recorded March 09 with Fari Bradley for Six Pillars to Persia, a weekly radio Middle East Arts and Culture show on UK’s art-music radio station Resonance104.4FM.
Navabi is taking part in a group show with Six Pillars in London, June 2013, for more details see the links below.
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Six Pillars to Persia Xtra – Palestinian Art “Resilience and Light”
Canterbury’s University of Kent hosts a group show of both Palestinian renowned and younger artists “RESILIENCE OF LIGHT”. Featured are Leila Shawa, Abraaj Prize winner Taysir Batniji and our guest here contributing artist Hani Zurob. Along with Zurob co-curator Aser El Saqqa of Arts Canteen joins us in the studio to explain the show and extend the discussion around Palestinian art in general.
Six Pillars is a focus on Middle Eastern Arts and Culture. Weekly on Friday evenings at 7.30-8pm, repeated Wednesdays 1.30-2pm GMT
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The 2nd series of Six Pillars to Persia has run weekly since 2007, the first in 2005-6.
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Six Pillars – Munira Mirza
The Cultural Advisor to the Mayor explains her reasons for travelling out to the Middle East and promoting a London festival. This interview was recorded at the March Meeting, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Six Pillars – Jameel Prize, V&A Museum
The Jameel Prize is awarded to artist Rachid Koraïchi. We discuss the history and aims of the Jameel prize with one of its curators Salma Tuqan, and the winning work with Koraïchi himself (via a translator).
Sufi-born Koraïchi is influenced by an interest in life’s signs – real and imaginary, and his work contains glyphs and ciphers drawn from other cultures, mainly Arabic calligraphic scripts. Koraïchi’s sculptures and installations explore a wide range of media such as ceramics, textiles, various metals and paint on silk, paper and canvas. His winning works were large cloth hangings, hung around the Jameel Gallery inside the V&A museum, where this interview took place.
Six Pillars – Shallow Water, Deep Skin
Acid Drops - 2005
Still: political activist and entomologist Shahin Nawai in 'Shallow Water, Deep Skin'
Nooshin Farhid, video artist, whose solo show Shallow Water, Deep Skin is now running at East London’s The Agency Gallery discusses her work and process with us back in 2008. Over the years Farhid has co-curated a number of exhibitions including “Use this Kind of Sky” and has exhibited the world over gathering together a considerable body of work and lengthy resumé.
Farhid’s videos employ different subjects and scenarios that thread together with a connecting sense of agitation and grit. We discuss her interests and how Fahid’s ideas form which interestingly harks back to her own experiences as an immigrant settling in the UK. The unwillingness to settle for what is on offer, something that is evident in all her work, reflects Farhid’s views on the current state of society, politics and ideology. Though not overtly political, (for this inevitably enables privileged authority to manipulate the artist into the cul de sac of irrelevance), her work picks away at those daily familiar stabilising forces within the space of the everyday and also within contemporary art itself.
Farhid’s work, eclectic and conceptually nomadic, uses the camera as a notebook collecting fragments of random events and chance meetings that collectively question the incessant drive towards normality and conformity. Farhid appropriates other ‘dumbing’ forms of popular media: soaps, reality TV, Bollywood, MTV, raw material welded together in fragments, each one activating and qualifying its predecessor. This process produces a contemporary surreal space that re-presents the familiar in that which is astonishing and invites the viewer to reconsider. In her most recent work Shallow Water, Deep Skin, featuring political activist and entomologist Shahin Nawai in ‘Shallow Water, Deep Skin’ Farhid reaches the apex of her observations of the human disconnect by melding together the swarming world of nature and human kinds’ own busy, teeming concerns.
Most of all, Farhid turns out to be a quirky and humorous talent, who works as both artist and curator, resident and outsider. This interview was first broadcast from the ResonanceFM studios in 2008.
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’.
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.
Six Pillars – Mahmoud Bakhshi at Saatchi
An interview with award winning artist Mahmoud Bakhshi as he begins his three day residency and prepares for his historic solo show at Saatchi Gallery. The interview is translated by curator Vali Mahlouji, one of the people who nominated Mahmoud for the Magic of Persia Contemporary Arts Prize (MOPCAP) in the first place.
Mahmoud Bakhshi draws inspiration for his works from the political and social issues that surround him. Born in Tehran, Iran, he is a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, and has exhibited internationally since 2006. Mahmoud is also supported by the Delfina Foundation.
First broadcast on Sept 20th 2010 from ResonanceFM studios
Unimagining Corporate Greenwashing
James Marriott, of Platform, an organization that brings together artists & activists to create projects focused on social and ecological justice, in conversation with John Jordan, co-founder of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, a network of socially engaged artists and activists whose work falls in between resistance and creativity, culture and politics, art and life.
They discuss what makes art such an effective catalyst for change, the history of art-activism, the ailing condition of art institutions, the architecture of corporate sponsorship of cultural institutions and how the Lab of ii recently exposed the Tate Modern’s complicity with BP’s project of maintaining a ’social license to operate’.