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Bahar Samadi

Solo exhibition of Bahar Samadi

Opening on June 30th, 2023
On View until July 14th, 2023

Not what is made, but how it is made.
The images are recorded and re-recorded over and over using various tools. Re-recording an image gives me the opportunity to search for it again and again, or in other words, touch it. At the same time, Re-recording over and over, displaying it, repeating its display, and displaying its repeating display, offers me a new sense of time: I grasp it, I crush it, I open it, and then I let it go.
The relationship between the filmmaker and her material is the simultaneous relationship between the dominator and the dominated. The power of the filmmaker lies in her interventions in the time of the image, in the frame shake, in the repetition of the images, in the movement from one image to another, in the birth of an image from another image, in the image of the image of the image and so on. Despite this, the power of the image is in the image itself, as it is the original unit, and regardless of what happens to it, something about it will always remain the same.*
* Excerpts of artists’ text for catalogue

End of Year Group Exhibition

Opening on 24th February 2023
On View until 17th March 2023

Artists:
Farhad Ahrarnia, Shaqayeq Ahmadian, Sara Assareh, Samira Eskandarfar, Mohamad Eskandari, Ebrahim Eskandari, Reihaneh Afzalian, Sanahin Babajanians, Fatemeh Bahman Siyahmard, Dadbeh Bassir,Parisa Taghipour, Sara Tavana, Manijeh Hejazi, Parisa Hejazi, Sara Hosseini, Zari Hosseini, Hamid Hemayatian, Anahita Darabbeigi, Nasim Davari, Raoof Dashti, Navid Salajegheh, Sara Soleimani Qashqayi,Amir Hossein Shahnazi, Hamed Sahihi, Nastaran Safaei, Bahar Samadi, Kiarang Alaei, Maryam Farzadian, Mayram Farshad, Mehdi Farhadian, Naghmeh Ghassemlou, Amirali Ghasemi, Narges Mohamadian, Shirin Mellatgohar,Koosha Moossavi, Parsoua Mahtash, Elmira Mirmiran, Allahyar Najafi, Siamak Nasr, Nazgol Nayeri, Leila Nouraei, Mohammad Hamzeh, Marjan Hoshiar.

Don’t be sad, my land!
I have planted flower seeds in your wounds
One day there will be flower everywhere…
Alireza Roushan

For Women, For Life, For Freedom

It is through artistic creations that Iran reveals her true self and this many believe constitutes her most precious legacy. The Persian legacy has endured many turbulences of history. No historical shock has been able to break the chain. There were interruptions, yet they always permitted even provoked a resumption of creativity; ideas, styles, techniques forcefully imposed, were accepted and integrated in to our existing practice. The Iranian spirit is a tenacious one, we can endure extremes and at the same time our thousands of years of history teaches us to remain optimistic and persistent.
Throughout the last forty-four years of our perpetual revolution, the visual artists have had to carve their independence; in the first years the universities were purged through the so-called Cultural Revolution and artists and professors had to look for other jobs or start private classes. Many left the country. Although it was a difficult struggle, but they succeeded in achieving autonomy from a Regime that controls the distribution of our national wealth and would never support progressive arts. This resilient attitude which is now adapted by the younger generations, was very important in the recent difficult times where despite pressures and the fears, the visual arts has stood its ground and has been an outspoken and integral part of the structure of our brave civil society.
Our artists continue to consciously challenge the status quo and the peripheral environment as well as themselves. They insist on their sense of independence and persist in their capabilities like all other modern human beings. They help preserve a Persian legacy, enriching our lives and inspiring us as a nation to become better than we are. It is this perseverance and humility that is the source of the merit of Iranian arts and its limitless potential.
We are constantly reminded of our legendry bird: The Phoenix who is believed to possess the knowledge of all times, from ashes she rises to create wonderment, she plunges in to flames to be purified , to rise again, every time stronger, every time mightier.
Nazila Noebashari

To see more of this exhibition, please follow us on Instagram: @aarangallerytehran

Address: Neauphle Le Chateau, Lolagar St. No 5.
Tel: +98 21 66702233
We are open Wednesdays and Thursdays 1-6 pm.
For opening day and Fridays: 4-8 pm

Festival of moving images, sound and performance art

26th July- August 2nd, 2019
Main venue: Aaran Projects
In collaboration with Parkingallery, New Media Society, Tirafkan Cultural Foundation, Studio Markof, Platform 3 and Bidar School.

Limited Access 8 will take place in six venues across the city with parallel programs, A/V Performances, Talks and workshops, and studio visits, marking the Iranian summer month of Mordad as an exceptional moment for Moving Images, Sound, and New Media.

General Overview of the Programs

The curated screening programs will rotate between Aaran Projects, freshly opened Bidar School for art and literature and New Media projects. This important section follows the tradition of the program “Limited Access Forum,” which is a selection of over 150 new videos submitted for the open call this year. Another interesting part is forgotten gems from the Parkingallery video archive, which is today’s most comprehensive video library of Iranian video art.

A selection of Video installations exhibited in the last few years in different venues in Iran and abroad will be presented at Aaran Projects. Artists featured are Hossein Valamanesh, Ghodratollah Agheli, Bahar Samadi, Shilan Borhani, Mehdi Shiri, Jaleh Nesari, Tarlan Rafiezadeh, Soheila Golestani, and Sara Asefi.

Platform 3 will host experimental animation, installations, screenings, and workshops, curated by the artist collective “Animation; Experiment.”

Studio Markof will host sound projects, audiovisual performances, talks, and an open platform for musicians and sound artists to join in.

Tirafkan Cultural Foundation will host “Video Sports,” which is Curated by Amirali Ghasemi. “Video Sports” features the works of 7 Iranian artists from three generations who have done exemplary work on the subject of sports from a personal point of view.
Artists featured in this selection are: Khosro Sinai | Sadegh Tirafkan | Fereydoun Ave | Ehsan Arjmand | Negar Farajiani | Nogol Mazloumi | Mohammad Shirvani

Guest curators of this edition of the festival are Tasja Langenbach, Faraz Anoushehpour, Nebras Hoveizavi, Minou Iranpour, Amirali Ghasemi & Arash Khakpour, and collectives like Noise A Noise & Animation; Experiment.

About Limited Access Festival

Parkingallery Projects launched the First Limited Access Festival in 2007. Parkingallery Projects was an independent artist-run space in Tehran focused on video, sound, and performance art. Since its inception, Limited Access has been able to showcase the works of many prominent and emerging artists from Iran and worldwide.

There was an open call for video and sound pieces and proposals for audiovisual and performance projects in the last seven Festivals. In addition, the festival presented guest-curated international programs. It offered an archival section that provided a chance to look back at the history of moving images/video and experimental films and extract practical material and parallel educational programs.
Since the beginning, the Festival has collaborated with various institutions and explored archives in Berlin, Stockholm, Helsinki, Cairo, Ljubljana, Paris, Toronto, San Francisco, Vienna, Montreal, Brussels, The Hague, Dublin, etc., to fulfill its mission: that is to reduce the gap between the artistic fields and promote interdisciplinary approaches and practices.
For information on programs and further details, visit: www.limitedaccessfestival.com

 

Mass in Movement-1
Studio 51
Opening at Aaran Gallery on 15 December 2017
On view until 5 January 2018

Mass in movement, a body of works which re-activate a large number of primary sources, is the product of the recent collaboration at Studio 51. These sources are used to counter their original context and function. Therefore, we are to see a situation in which arises a rupture between the thing and the system of signs making that thing thinkable. A found collection of family slides; panoramic photographs of Tehran from the top of Milad Tower; documents pertaining to events in the news; obtained videos from internet’s cyber-space, YouTube and more, are all things that can find themselves in this situation i.e. distortion of meaningful significations through unconventional use of signifiers.

“Studio 51” has been a collaborative project between Bahar Samadi and Navid Salajegheh since 2014. By recycling and re-employing pre-existing footages, as well as, textual/visual materials, and then processing them through a diverse extent of mediums, spanning from moving images to performance, installation, and painting, they attempt to construct a series of micro-narratives and assemblages, which reappear in a here and now that is alternative to their original time and space. The output of these projects are visual, auditory or tactile experiments that create new relationships between content and expression of materials. “Studio 51”, also, functions as a laboratory for these two artists to discover new forms for the possibilities of “working together ” and, ultimately, to observe the way they evolve from one project to another.



Displacement
Solo exhibition of Bahar Samadi
Opening at Aaran Gallery on 25th November 2016
On view until 8th December

A door opens. A considerable amount of the material in my work is other people’s images and sound archives. Anything that can be filmed, re-filmed and filmed over and over, or scanned, re-recorded or downloaded, can become a part of the process. These diverse images are from amateur 8mm films that I have found as well as downloaded videos from cyberspace or forgotten files on a hard disk. Any camera or imaging device can be incorporated in to my work. There is no limit. Passing through the machines.
A ladder. It’s only through the montage process that the work begins, takes shape and comes to an end. There is no predefined structure or script. The images as they are – or independent from their content which can be non representational- create their own setting. Or they impose the necessity of repetition, or as an indicator of their nature in a different arrangement. This repetition transforms an ordinary image to a mysterious matter. Images are in dialogue with each other and at the same time they compete to become the dominant image. One image invites another one, passes through it and returns to it. Image finds its own “other” presence, either in resemblance or in-distinction; introduces it, possesses it, releases it or is replaced by it. A row of windmills.
The images are the main characters. The image of a tree is not a tree, but an image in which there is a tree.
Here is the fiesta of dancing images.
Excerpt from catalogue written by Bahar Samadi

Bahar Samadi born in 1981, has studied Architecture at the Art Faculty of Azad University of Tehran, Iran and continued her studies in field of Filmmaking at Eicar Cinema School in Paris, in 2012.In the course of filmmaking, she primarily reaches for found footages and her personal archive, using structural techniques like cinematic omission and narrative form diversion to rewrite the pictorial memory of images. She decodes probable life of images by embarking on an imaginary journey between the author and the spectator. Her films have been shown in a number of platforms, galleries and film festivals around the world such as “ Semi Dark Room-Luminous Void” at Aaran Projects-Iran (2015), “Cork Film Festival”- Ireland (2014), “Fronteira – International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival” – Brazil (2014), “Limerick Avant-Garde Cinema, The Royal Picture Show” – Ireland (2014), “The 10th Beijing Independent Film Festival” – China (2013), “42nd International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR)”- Netherlands (2013).



Opening at Aaran Projects on 18th September.

Group installation exhibition and performances curated by Amir Ali Ghassemi

Artists: Atoosa Pourhosseini, Navid Salajegheh and Bahar Samadi

Semi-Dark Room is a group installation exhibition & performances taking place at Aaran projects in the last days September. The exhibition includes the installation experiences in the field of «Expanded Cinema», «Performance Art» and «Moving images installations» by the artists.
In «Semi-Dark Room» a limited source of light partially lightens the room. Light passes through series of intervening filters that sometimes depict images and at other times contain memories. In the meantime the devised machinery are important passages that regardless of their obvious logic, operate and implement changes and alterations that are for and against perception.

Semi Dark Room is part of a project titled “The Luminous Void”, other programs of this project will be on view at Lajevardi Collection and Darbast Platform. For More info and data please visit website of “New Media Society”: www.newmediasoc.com

Bahar Samadi (b.1981, Tehran)is a Tehran Paris experimental film maker.
She studied architecture in Azad University of Art and Architecture in Tehran, Iran (2006) and graduated in Filmmaking from EICAR university of Paris, France (2012).

Navid Salajegheh (b. 1981, Tehran) is a Paris based architect, urban designer and visual artist. He received his MA in Architecture from Azad Art and Architecture university of Tehran and graduated in “Architecture: city and urban project” from L’ecole nationale d’Architecture de Marseille, Marseille/France. Together with Bahar Samadi they have started Studio 51.

Atoosa Pour Hosseini (b. Tehran 1981) is an artist based in Dublin/ Ireland. She holds a
MA in Fine Art Media from National College of Art and Design, Dublin (2014), as well as BA
in Fine Art Painting at Azad University of Art and Architecture, Tehran (2007).