Tag Archives: Iran

Six Pillars – Hamed Nikpay

Composer-singer Hamed Nikpay speaks from USA about writing music, leaving Iran for the US in his 20s and what he’s currently listening to on his Ipod.

The interview comes prior to his collaboration with dancer and choreographer Shahrokh Moshkin Ghalam, London 2012. Both Nikpay and Ghalam have experimented extensively with forms of juerga and toque from Flamenco interwoven into Persian classical forms and both are highly passionate in their delivery, so it makes perfect sense for them to work together on stage, Nikpay providing the music, Moshkin Ghalam the dance.

Six Pillars – Iran’s Godfather of Psyche

Back from the Brink – An Audio Portrait
Kouroush Yaghmaie brought psyche music to Iran. He lived his music from his teens to adulthood until banned from singing, he was forced to produce children’s songs under a pseudonym for 19 years. His new album ‘Back from the Brink’ comes as a double CD and book, the extensive and detailed text by Kouroush Yaghmaie himself. In it Yaghmaie describes how he used his guitar to sound like a sitar, how his fellow musicians fell out of performing and heartbreakingly, lost the gift of music. Six Pillars has created a bespoke audio piece with a voice narrating over the songs the words of the man who for so long could not speak out. First broadcast in May 2012.

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.

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Six Pillars – Ebi

Ebi is one of Iran’s most foremost pop singers from the 70s, although his music has been banned there for many years. Listening to his unique, warm baritone voice, to his stirring ballads, it’s amazing to think that over 40 years ago Ebi was already a well-established star with fans all over the world.

Ebi left Iran two years before the ’79 Islamic Revolution after recording six hit albums, and continued to work in the US. Later, he recorded another 13 albums and is still performing at sold-out concerts at prestigious venues around the world including the Sydney Opera House and Washington DC’s Kennedy Center.

In 2010 Ebi played his only UK concert for years at the Royal Albert Hall to help support the fight against Multiple Sclerosis (MS).  We recorded an interview with the man himself while he was in London. The song below, Tasmim, critiques the Iranian elections of 2009. The video features two glass bowls, one filled with worms the other cockroaches as a suggestive metaphor.

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Six Pillars – The Colonel

An interview with the director of Haus Publishing, who have translated banned book The Colonel from Farsi to English for print. In its native Iran, where the office of censorship has prohibited publication, The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi cannot be read, but now published in German and English, this critical work has been granted a voice in the outside world.

Barbara Schwepcke discusses the difficulties and importance of publishing authors like Dowlatabadi and the role of literature in revolutionary times.

This programme was originally broadcast Monday 12th September 2011 from the ResonanceFM studios.

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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 – 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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Six Pillars – Persian Maps

“History and geography are the basis of all the humanities.“

After falling in love with a map of Persia in Harrods, Dr Ala’i spent years researching the cartography of Iran and Persia before publishing two large volumes by Brill, on different maps of Persia from the 1400s to 1925.

Dr Ala’i was invited by Iran Heritage to give a talk in January 2011 on his extensively researched specialty, and Six Pillars interviewed him to find out more about this passion of his.

This is the whole interview, the first part of which was broadcast in January 2011 on Six Pillars to Persia, from the Resonance104.4Fm studios, London.

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Six Pillars – The First UK Iranian Film Festival

November saw the launch of the London’s first Iranian Film Festival: UKIFF.

In late October we met with one of the volunteers, Costas Sarkas, at one of UKIFF’s networking events, to find out what it was all about.

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