Soirée film-rencontre "My mother - The history of Iran" - 1/3/16
Swiss premiere of My Mother – the History of Iran (2015, vo angl.), followed by a talk and an open discussion with the artist and filmmaker Shahram Entekhabi.
Date and time: Tuesday 1 March 2016, at 18:15
Venue: Bâtiment des Philosophes | PHIL201, bd des Philosophes 22 – Genève
Free entry
The event is organized by Unité d'arabe in cooperation with SGMOIK (Swiss Society for the Middle East and Islamic Cultures) and the Activités Culturelles de l'Unité de Genève.
Sophie Glutz Von Blotzheim Alsaadi and Elahe Helbig will accompany you through the evening.
For further information please contact .
My Mother – the History of Iran traces two interwoven narrative strands: a personal history and the last eighty years of Iranian history. The Berlin-based artist Shahram Entekhabi casts a glance on history by looking back to the year 1935 when his mother, Aghdas Dabestani, was born. In the same year an act of politics made ‘Persia’ become ‘Iran’, changing the dynamics of the geopolitical landscape. In the interplay of personal and national history, the character of the mother functions as a storyteller that forms the nexus between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Combining historical facts with personal tales and fictional elements illustrates what had shaped the collective memory of a nation over this span of decades. The result is a narrative deviating from the mainstream, which calls into question social, cultural and economic developments in Iran. My Mother – the History of Iran reveals an undisguised glance upon the current situation of the country and throws up a whole platitude of socio-politically relevant questions about Iranian life today.
Following the screening, Shahram Entekhabi is going to talk about his movie, its reception in and outside of Iran, as well as other film projects that emerged out of it. In collaboration with artists and directors inside and outside Iran, Entekhabi places more emphasis in his projects on coexistence in a megapolis like Tehran and heterogeneous social dimensions of contemporary Iranian society. The talk concludes with questions from and an open discussion with the audience.
About Shahram Entekhabi:
Shahram Entekhabi is an Iranian-born artist and architect whose work has been the subject of many exhibitions all over the world. Currently living and working across Iran and Europe, Entekhabi’s works disintegrate prevailing ideas of the urban space as belonging solely to the practice and performance of the white, middle class, heterosexual male. He explores these ideas via a variety of performative practices using architecture, installation and digital media. By visualizing fear, paranoia and stereotypes that owe to colour, religion or ethnicity, Entekhabi delves into the issue of society’s prejudices, suspicions and bifurcations with a proclaimed ‘Other’. The artist recreates the cliché conception of migrants and aims to reflect the negative ideas of chauvinism, terrorism and criminality, which have often been cultivated in Western societies – particularly after 9/11. Sometimes personifying the stereotyped characters himself, Entekhabi dislocates their aggressive potential and conveys how people participate in the ghettoization of the minority through perception, politics, propaganda and control. The question of visibility and invisibility is therefore a theme he recurrently explores within his practice.