Taking its title from the lead film by Marwa Arsanios, I’ve Heard Stories is a film program exploring the intersection of art and documentary practices. The selected works reveal a variety of narratives on location, landscape, and territory built on archival materials as well as fictional anecdotes, bringing together conflictual statements about spaces in transition. The films reenact events, reproduce stories, or play narratives against images to create a spatial disorientation. Collectively, they point to the ways in which archives perpetually mediate the relationship between personal and historical modes of knowing.

—Azar Mahmoudian

RELATED EVENT:

POLITICS OF DISPLAY: Reflections on International Exhibitions of Iranian Art
A lecture by Azar Mahmoudian
Friday, May 30, 4PM
Bancroft Hall 200B
4 Bancroft Avenue, Toronto

Since the early 2000s, there has been a proliferation of curatorial initiatives that feature the presentation of “Iranian Art” for international audiences. An array of survey exhibitions have been (re)produced under a national label, with an emphasis on “roots” and “origins”, which claim to offer a glimpse into an isolated society. Mahmoudian offers a critique of this model of knowledge production in curatorial practice and asks us to actively question the paradigm of national exhibition making in particular, and the regionalization of art as a credible producer of content in general. Looking at the modes of distribution of the art which is produced in Iran, she maps the structures of visibility of Iranian art within the current system of international art circulation. As an alternative, she concludes that archiving can be a productive strategy for opening up the dominant historicist model of art exchange.

Presented by the Foundation for Iranian Studies.