CURATORIAL | EDUCATIONAL | TELEPRESENCE | PERFORMANCE

PROJECTS’ LIST

2019
Iranian American Museum (IAM) |
Founding Director | 2018-Present
The 501(c) (3) nonprofit celebrates the histories, arts, cultures, and contributions of Iranian to the United States through innovative, inclusive, equitable, and diverse modes of community organization and cross-cultural participation. IAM’s visual identity and Website are under construction in collaboration with Mani Nilchiani and Nooshin Rostami.

Poetic Societies | Founding Director | Global | September 6, 2017-Present
The 501 (c) (3) nonprofit, Poetic Societies, is a curatorial and performance lab for the ancestral and digital healing of self, land, and senses of belonging. Its resident artists, musicians, and healers practice poetic-being and work together to create transnational celebratory memories.

Drone Rituals | Performer | Detroit | 2018-Present
The experimental series of multimedia rituals explores the subversive, violent, and poetic qualities of drones.

2018

ReMOooOTE Telepresence Healing Festival | Founder, Producing Curator | The Arab American National Museum, Dearborn, Xcept Studio, Tehran, Sidewalk Festival, Detroit, Analog Room, Dubai | December 21, 2018
Envisioned as a multiwavelength celebratory currency of empathy, wisdom, harmony, magic, and pleasure, “REMOooOTE TELEPRESENCE HEALING FESTIVAL” connects and grounds bodies, languages, technologies, and lands above and beyond measurements. The healing festival is designed for the new decade with real-time multilocational therapeutic performances, somatic meditations, and healing virtual rooms with performers, musicians, healers, technologist, and production crews connecting audiences across the globe.

Poetic Societies: Utopian Dinners: Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead Tour 2018 Co-curator with the Hinterlands | Dixieland Flea Market, Waterford Township + Sidewalk Festival, Detroit | August 11-12, 2018
The two-day participatory new media performance event was co-produced by Poetic Societies and the Hinterlands for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) with the goal of connecting diverse audiences across the geographical and cultural borders through playful meals.

2017

Poetic Societies: REMOooOTE Telepresence Festival with Sidewalk Festival (DetroitDubai)
Founding curator | Sidewalk Festival, Detroit + Analog Room, Dubai | August 5, 2017
The two-channel telepresence celebration connected performers and audiences in Detroit and Dubai as a part of the REMOooOTE Telepresence Festival produced by Poetic Societies in collaboration with Analog Room.

Poetic Societies: [] the line
Play House, Detroit + Pejman Foundation, Tehran | September 13-October 11 (Edition 1), 2017-Present | Founding curator, edition 1 co-produced with the Hinterland | 2017
The five-week online workshop was focused on telepresence performance production and included physical rehearsals, dialogue sessions, and hands-on research between Detroit and Tehran for 25 artists.

Are we on the same wavelength?
Performer | The GoodLab, Detroit | 2017
The interactive multimedia performance was presented as a part of the Stitching Hours with Levon Kafafian and Ash Arder.

2016

WRITE SWANA WOMXN
Curator | Global | March 21, 2016-Present
A series of multilocational Wiki-edit-a-thon sessions for celebrating and writing South West Asian and North African woman social art practitioners and community organizers into Wikipedia. The telepresence editing sessions were produced in collaboration with Art+Feminism

2015

This is just an Image Co-curator with Lila Nazemian | Eastern Market, Detroit | July 19, 2015
The duo exhibition presented works by Sara Ouhaddou and Peyman Shafeezadeh. Curators led a public panel with the artists on the opening and ended the night with a block party with DJ and producer, Salar Ansari.

FREEWAY: Little Syria
Curator and performer | Lower West Side, The Armory Show, NYC | March 8, 2015
Co-created with Brian Zegeer, the public celebration provided an opportunity for the Armory Show 2015 to connect to Little Syria, a vanished neighborhood in Lower West Side Manhattan to create awareness about the endangered historical sites in the area.

360-degree live journalism with artists in Iran
Curatorial adviser | The Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University and Stanford University | 2014-2015.
The project explored the impact of immersive real-time 360-degree virtual news experience as a tactic for cultivating empathy among distant communities. The first series was focused on the Iranian artistic identity inside and outside of the country.

Culturerunners Residency Program 2014-15
Curator and driver | Houston, Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Ashville, Washington D.C., Cambridge, NYC, Detroit, Maine | March 2014-August 2015
The mobile residency provided space for artists from the Middle East and the U.S. to live together and collaborate on experiments and projects along the way. The residency consisted of carefully curated exhibitions and programs with museums and universities as well as organic encounters with diverse communities, and grassroots movements across the US.

2014

Culturunners Symposium at MIT Media Lab
Co-curator with Azra Aksamij | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge | October 5, 2014
The daylong multi-component program was a roving portrayal of personal experiences, case studies, and theories that connected narratives, economies, politics, cultures, and landscapes in the US and the Middle East. It presented short stories and new media projects by 40 international artists and was hosted by MIT Media Lab. Audience members had the opportunity to move between different curated environments, interact with the presenters, and examine the wearable, mobile, and online technologies developed in the Culturunners MIT workshops.

Culturunners Workshops
Co-curator with Azra Aksamija and Stephen Stapleton | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge | October 1-6, 2014
The week-long workshop brought together 20 international artists, designers, filmmakers, scientists, curators, and scholars whose practices inspire novel approaches towards cross-cultural exchanges specific to the US and the Middle East. Together, they developed and tested creative communication technologies and narrative techniques for Culturunners mobile residency program.

Culturunners Launch
Rothko Chapel, Houston | Co-curator and co-producer | September 21, 2014
In the spirit of the Chapel’s humanist mission to inspire people to action through art and contemplation, and to provide a forum for global concerns, the event brought together pioneering artists, scholars, and community groups to cultivate new perspectives on cultural collaboration on the UN’s International Day of Peace.

Body without Organ
Performer with Mona Aghababaei | NYC, Isfahan | April 2014
The remote durational performance was a remote collaboration of embodiment through a traveling wearable sculpture made by Aghababaee.

Fixed Unknowns Co-curator with Molly Kleiman (The Back Room | Taymour Grahne Gallery in Tribeca, NYC | 4 July-6 September, 2014
The works by Kamrooz Aram, Shirana Shahbazi, and Hannah Whitaker in Fixed Unknowns draw upon classical genres of image-making—the portrait, the landscape, the still life. Each artist introduces a syntax: a repeated grid of floral motifs lifted from a Persian carpet; an overlapping series of geometric planes; a pattern sourced from a Bauhaus textile, hand-cut on a screen. They trouble the seeming fixity of these repeating designs, and their attendant politics and histories, through near-erasures and imperfect cover-ups.

I Am Only A Reporter
Co-curator with Molly Kleiman (The Back Room) | Art Dubai Modern Section | March 19-22, 2014
In an ongoing series of spare works, rendered delicately on notebook paper, produced during the mid-1980s, Mohassess (1938, Tehran, IR – 2008, New York, US) tested the limits of animating a line, turning a pen stroke into an acrobatic feat. Mohassess’s lines—whether spare or ecstatically spurting with ink—report contradictions in contemporary life, leaving the viewer to contend with ambiguities “beyond the how and the why.”

Open Relationship
Co-curator with Molly Kleiman (The Back Room) | Recess, NYC |
November 1, 2014
The public panel discussion acted as a coda for “Spatial-Making-Do,” an eight-week, three-channel telepresence workshop produced by The Back Room in collaboration with CultureHub Project of LaMaMa Theather with artists, art organizers, and scholars in Detroit, New York, Isfahan, and Tehran.

Spatial-Making-Do
Co-curator with Molly Kleiman | CultureHub at LaMaMa Theater, NYC + Sazmanab, Tehran + Mani Studio, Isfahan | May 2-June 12, 2014
The eight-week-long three-channel telepresence workshop was produced in collaboration with the CultureHub project of LaMama Theather and connected 45 artists, curators, and organizers in Isfahan, New York, and Tehran. The program received the “Building Bridges” Grant of the Doris Duke Foundation in 2013.

2013

Letters
Curator | Shirin Gallery NY | October 24-November 28, 2013
The solo exhibition presented collage mixed media works of Shadi Yousefian created from the letters the artists exchanged with her family after migrating to the United States.

The Last Strand
Curator | Shirin Gallery NY | January 23-March 5, 2014
The solo exhibition presented installation and painting by Hadi Hazavei. It was presented as a part of ongoing research on a collective of Iranian contemporary artists: Abbass Kiarostami, Ardeshir Mohassess, Nicky Nodjoumi, and Hadi Hazavei.

Conducting Studies
Creator | Phase I with Marco Pinter | 2014-Present
The multimedia performance project translates memorable songs and anthems to the movements of music conductors to digital and robotic drawings.

2012

Compose, Composite, Composition
Co-creator with Molly Kleiman | CultureHub at LaMaMa Theather, NYC, Sazmanab, Tehran, Hozeh Honari, Mashhad | 2012
The telepresence public discussion provided an opportunity for artists and curators in Isfahan, Mashhad, and Tehran to have a direct conversation with Shirana Shahbazi after an hour lecture presented by the artist. The event was held in conjunction with the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, "New Photography 2012" the presented a sectional body of work by Shahbazi.

Subway
Co-creator with Andy Quitmeyer | 2012 The multimedia participatory performance celebrates public movement and sheds light on the arbitrary regulations of body movement in public spaces around the globe.

OshinAva
Creator and performer | Japan, US, Iran | 2012

The subversive performance was situated in the Japanese reality TV show “Shittoko you should know!“ and was broadcasted live in Japan. It was a commentary on ”Oshin,” a Japanese soap opera that was censored, partially re-narrated, dubbed, and nationally broadcast in Iran in the 80s. The main character “Oshin” was widely celebrated as an ideal hardworking obedient wife. TV food judges tasted the food that was made based on Ava’s recipes at the TV station in Osaka.

Dancing by Myself in Public
Creator and performer | Time Square Station, NYC | 2012
The improvised public performance took place at the Time Square Subway Station in NYC and a response to the norms and laws regulating public movement.

Pryings 2012
Creator and performer | NYC | 2012 The full-length reenactment of Vito Acconci's “Pryings 1971” questions the representation of women in his piece.

2011

Performance on Trial
Co-curator with Molly Kleiman | White Box, NYC | November 20, 2011
The panel proposed questions to Shirin Neshat and Wafaa Bilal on the making of their latest performance pieces Overruled and A Call. The program was moderated by Nicholas Mirzaoeff and was hosted by White Box in New York City in collaboration with Sazmanab Platform for Contemporary Arts in Tehran.

A Call
Co-curator with Molly Kleiman | White Box, NYC + Aaran Gallery, Tehran | September 23, 2011 | Documentation on view through October 10, 2011
The two-channel large scale performance was the first independent memorial ever dedicated to the dead, the living, and the forgotten of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) created in collaboration with Wafaa Bilal and produced by The Back Room with Aaran Gallery and Sazmanab in Tehran.

Siting Performance
Co-curator with Molly Kleiman | Eyebeam, NYC + Silk Road Gallery, Tehran | April 16, 17, 2011
The two-channel two-day telepresence workshop with Richard Schechner and Bavand Behpoor connected 40 artists in Tehran and New York for discourse on ritual, dark play, and site and ended with proposals for site-specific interventions. The program was hosted by Silk Road Gallery in Tehran and Eyebeam in New York.

The Back Room
Co-founder and Co-director with Molly Kleiman
The pedagogical and curatorial project provides space for direct discussion and collaboration between the artists, curators, and writers in Iran and the US.

2009

Sufi Garden
Creator | The Empty Quarter Gallery, Dubai | 2009
The interactive floral installation depicted the seven steps of becoming a Sufi in the form of a floating garden with Rumi poems, white roses, sand, tall branches, and foliages.

Paris's Musee du Quai Branly presents 165 Years of Iranian Photography
Assistant Director to Anahita Ghabaian Ettehadieh | Quai Branly Museum, Paris | 2009
The 2nd Photoquai biennial was directed by Anahita Ghabaian Ettehadieh, Director of the Silk Road Gallery of Tehran, the first art space dedicated to photography in Iran that she founded in 2001. The exhibition was co-curated by Bahman Jalali and Hasan Sarbhakshian.

The House
Assistant Curator to Anahita Ghabaian Ettehadieh | Silk Road Gallery, Tehran | December 11, 2009
The solo exhibition presented works by Mehrdad Naraghi on the forgotten aspects of domestic life in Iran.

Past Continous Tense
Curator | Silk Road Gallery, Tehran | 2009
The poetic Series superimposes a cell phone photograph of a cloud on various oil sites in the artist’s hometown in southern Iran.

Forough: They Planted her in the Garden that Day
Assistant Curator to Anahita Ghabaian | Silk Road Gallery, Tehran | June 15, 2009 The photo exhibition presented photographs by Yahya Dehghanpour from Forough Farokhzad’s funeral. It was evidence of Dehghanpour‘s modern photography and acted as a visual history of the intellectual community of Iran in 1967.

2008

Think Positive
Assistant Curator to Anahita Ghabaian | Silk Road Gallery | December 20, 2008
The group Photo and installation exhibition presented works by Katayoun Karami, Ali Nadjian and Ramyar Manouchezadeh

Nil, Nil
Assistant Curator to Anahita Ghabaian | Silk Road Gallery, Tehran | October 4, 2008
The solo exhibition was the first presentation of the series by Shadi Ghadirian commenting on the impact of the war on everyday life in Iran.

Black Cow
Curator | Silk Road Gallery, Tehran | May 31, 2008
The first solo exhibition of Babak Kazemi presented photographs washed with tar and gold from his hometown Abadan, one of Iran’s poor oil cities.

Solo Photography Exhibition of Peyman Hooshamandzadeh Assistant Curator to Anahita Ghabaian | Silk Road Gallery, Tehran | May 3, 2008
The solo photography exhibition presented the latest works of the artist.

2007

Mehrdad Najmabadi
Assistant Curator to Anahita Ghabaian | Silk Road Gallery, Tehran | 2007
The solo photography exhibition presented the latest works of the artist.

Red Room
Assistant Curator to Anahita Ghabaian | Silk Road Gallery, Tehran | 2007
The solo photography exhibition presented the latest works of the artist.

The Other Side Assistant Curator to Anahita Ghabaian | Silk Road Gallery, Tehran | 2007
The solo photography exhibition presented the latest works of the artist.

Floral Studies
Performer | 2007-Present
Ongoing floral explorations with flowers and foliages as living materials from 2006-Present.

Doroud!I practice somatic meditation and create tactical media to circulate knowledge, wisdom, and memories of empathic celebration among distant bodies—more. Curatorial Educational Project’s List Contact Home

Doroud!
I practice somatic meditation and create tactical media to circulate knowledge, wisdom, and memories of empathic celebration among distant bodies—more.

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