Iran. Making Space for New Media

2014
Redirecting east Residency – The Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art 

The Tehran of the nineteen nineties was not really acquainted with new media; the handful of galleries preferred to stick with the norms and dedicate themselves to showing painting, sculpture and, much more rarely, photography. Using images, posters and video extracts, the presentation sets out to shed some light on the progress of new media art in Iran. The talk begins with the belated emergence of media art toward the end of the last decade of twentieth century and looks at the reason why it blossomed in the early two thousands before languishing, forgotten, for several years. The forces behind its recent powerful and independent comeback are then addressed. In the absence of funding from either the government or abroad, the development of the new media art scene has only been possible thanks to collective efforts and organic self-organisation. The presentation takes video art in Iran and the way it has forged its own way ahead over the past fourteen years as a case study. Tehran’s new media scene is expanding into other cities, such as Isfahan, Sanandaj and Mashahad. At the same time, a few independent initiatives are try to push the back the boundaries in order to open up the space to more interdisciplinary practices by organising exhibitions and running festivals geared toward video art, sound and interactive projects and digital art, as well as holding regular audiovisual performance events.