AV-arkki’s screening at the Love & Anarchy – Helsinki International Film Festival presents experimental short films by artists and filmmakers of Iranian descent. The works in the screening explore memory and place, inviting reflection on the role of art as a keeper of personal and collective memory, as well as a creator of new (sense of) space.
The screening takes place on Sunday, September 21st at 13:00–14:28 at Kino Engel. The screening is followed by a discussion with Azar Saiyar and Sepideh Rahaa.
Shauheen Daneshfar’s Scented Rooms (featured image) takes the viewer to Tehran’s oldest theater, once a vibrant cultural space, but forced to close its doors after the 1979 revolution. Through poetic imagery, archival fragments, and reenacted scenes with actors, Daneshfar’s film aims to capture – and release – the spirit of the past era and the forms of resistance smoldering in the theatre’s depths, thus reviving the dormant theatre.
Shauheen Daneshfar (b. 1988, Tehran) is an artist, filmmaker and photographer based between Stockholm and Tehran. Working with analogue material, his works investigate memory, poetic imagery, film and still image and their intersections. His works utilize different materials and tools such as celluloid films, alternative chemical processes or other types of technological devices to achieve a poetic and melancholic aesthetic. He studied photography before joining the Iranian Youth Cinema Society (IYCS) to learn the ins and outs of filmmaking, adding to his knowledge through a cinematography bachelor’s degree at the University of Art in Tehran, he has a master’s degree in Film and Media from Stockholm University of the Arts. He co-founded the independent film company Rum Film, based in Stockholm.
Sepideh Rahaa: In Transition (2017).
In Sepideh Rahaa’s In Transition, we hear poetic monologues exchanged between two women. In the two visually elegant and melancholic images side by side, the women knit words and meaning into existence, generating space and significance in the world for each other.
Sepideh Rahaa (b. 1981) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Helsinki. Through her practice she actively investigates and questions the prevailing power structures, social norms and conventions while focusing on womanhood, storytelling, everyday life and resistances. And at best to initiate methods within contemporary art to create space for dialogue. Currently she is pursuing her doctoral studies in Contemporary Art at Aalto University. Her research interests include matter of representation, collaboration as practice, decolonisation and feminist politics.
In Azar Saiyar’s Helsinki–Teheran, a narrator born in Finland reflects on and dreams of Tehran. Saiyar skillfully weaves together various cinematic narratives, seeking to capture the (affective) knowledge of migration that passes from generation to generation.
Azar Saiyar is a Helsinki-based filmmaker and visual artist. She often uses archive materials and plays with images and words of collective memory to look towards ways of looking, remembering and storytelling. Her films have been screened at international film and media art festivals, galleries, exhibitions, museums, and broadcast on television.
Behzad Khosravi Noor: On The Dermis of History (2021).
Behzad Khosravi Noori’s film On The Dermis of History centers on a monument located in the middle of the Palestine Square in downtown Tehran. The sculpture is a memorial to the Palestinian struggle and, in particular, to the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising of 1987–1993. Khosravi Noori uses the monument as a starting point to explore the relationship and history between two hyper-politicised countries through artistic research.
Behzad Khosravi Noori, Ph.D is an artist, writer, educator, playgrounder, and necromancer. His research-based practice includes films, installations, as well as archival studies. His works investigate histories from The Global South, labor and the means of production, and histories of political relationships that have existed as a counter narration to the east-west dichotomy during the Cold War. By bringing multiple subjects into his study, he explores possible correspondences seen through the lenses of contemporary art practice, proletarianism, subalternity, and the technology of image production.
Khosravi Noori’s works have been shown at Kalmar Museum, Malmö art Museum, Venice Biennale, Timișoara Biennale, Ural industrial biennale, 12.0 Contemporary Islamabad, Tensta Konsthall, Sakakini art institution Ramallah Palestine, HDLU Zagreb, WHW Zagreb, Botkyrka Konsthall, CFF (Centre of Photography, Stockholm), Marabouparken, Stockholm, Centre of Contemporary art, Riga, Arran Gallery Tehran, among other venues.
He is a member of the editorial board of VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research.
The screening is a collaboration with Filmformin. AV-arkki and Filmform ar part of the DINAMO – Distribution Network of Artists’ Moving Image Organizations network.
The title of the screening is a passage from a poem by Rumi, translated by Muhammad Ali Mojaradi.
R&A Shorts: I saw my heart broken open, like a pomegranate
September 21st, at 13:00–14:28
Kino Engel, Helsinki
Tickets: R&A Shorts: I saw my heart broken open, like a pomegranate