The necessity of itinerancy – Behzad Khosravi Noori at CFF and Tempo Documentary Festival

Behzad Khosravi Noori, artist/writer and PhD candidate at Konstfack, welcomes you to
CFF, The Centre for Photography

Opening Thursday 8 February, 5–8 pm:

The Life of an Itinerant through a Pinhole, an exhibition about the photographic image, the cinematic representation and subaltern histories. By re-narrating archival material, signifying subaltern histories and evoking memories, the exhibition tries to tell stories from below of the social changes that have consequences in Iran until today.

The basic material of the exhibition comes from a local itinerant photographer, Gholamreza Amirbegi – the grandfather of the artist. The unique archive pictures as well as the family films depict an immigrant working class in Tehran approximately in the time between 1956 and 1968. They reflect the identity of this particular social group from the history of the city of Tehran after Second World War and the effects of war and the subsequent economic devastation and epidemic bankruptcy of smaller cities. Gholamreza’s images underline the relationship between the global and the local within an isolated working class neighbourhood in south west of Tehran – how global cinematic images have been important for people in Iran in the formation of identity and self-representation.

The Life of an Itinerant through a Pinhole introduce and reinforce the necessity of itinerancy not just as an act of the local itinerant photographer Gholamreza, but points to the notion of global travelling images and its effect on social and political conditions. This exhibition also highlights the absence of representation of this political and social identity in the realm of contemporary arts in Iran, as well as in the modern Iranian nation-state’s desire to construct a domestic ‘primitive’ people in order to build a Tehran-centric national Culture.

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Friday 2 March: Travelling portraits and Refracted Memories. Photography against History. A seminar day with Charlotte Bydler, Lecturer in Art history, School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University and Shahram Khosravi, Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Curated by Behzad Khosravi Noori.

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Thursday 8 March: Before and after image. A conversation, part of Tempo Documentary Festival, between artist/writer Behzad Khosravi Noori and filmmaker Shaon Chakraborty, focusing on archival materials in relation to modes of looking at the past trough the direct relation to the subject of the images.

For more details, please click. And thanks for the support, Photowall.

Konstfack c/o CFF, The Centre for Photography, Tjärhovsgatan 44, Stockholm