Imagine a city that you've only seen in reproductions or perhaps have merely
heard about. A place, like many others, that only exists for you through
indirect sources--the nightly news, hearsay, literature, magazines, movies, and
the Internet. Using these secondhand clues as firsthand research materials,
invited worldwide participants--who have Never Been to Tehran--will take
photographs (from their home base) of what they imagine Tehran to look like.
Contributors will upload their photos daily to an on-line photosharing site,
which will be projected as a slideshow simultaneously in galleries and public
spaces around the world (including Tehran). Anything that anyone might take a
photograph of is fair game, just as long as it feels like Tehran.
NEVER BEEN TO TEHRAN
www.neverbeentotehran.com
Participants
For the international contributors to this
exhibition, the task is to search through their daily lives for clues to a
foreign place, for the possibility that somewhere else exists right under their
noses and that, like some clunky form of astral projection, one can travel to
other lands without leaving home. New information technologies are expanding the
possibility of knowing a place to which you've never traveled. Hosts of amateur
and commercial websites and podcasts about a given city, its economy,
demographics, culture and subculture have opened the way for a new vernacular of
representation. As Tehran's image is regularly depicted in the dominant media,
it is a compelling challenge for the participants in this exhibition to sift
through the glut of images and information to cull out a personally constructed
version of an unfamiliar place. For viewers in Tehran, the exhibition presents a
chance to witness an unusual mirroring of their globally projected image, taken
from the daily lives and environs of outsiders.
Collectively, the artists and viewers of Never
Been to Tehran will be charting a liminal space stuck somewhere between here and
there that in our contemporary existence just might be home.
Andrea Grover and
Jon Rubin
Co-organizers
Contact: For
photo requests or further information, contact Andrea Grover at 713-868-2101 or
Jon Rubin at 510-912-2221, or e-mail us at
info@neverbeentotehran.com
... Payvand News - 04/02/08 ... --
