I Am Standing in the Middle of the Information Highway and Laughing – –

Curated by Raha Raissnia with Martin Germann

Artists: Jonas Mekas, Raha Raissnia, Andrew Chalk, Pip Chodorov, Martha Colburn, Milton Cruz, Albert Herter, Andrew Lampert, Jeanne Liotta, Timo Van Luijk, Panagiotis Mavridis, Jordan Mintzer, Jason Babak Mohaghegh, Stom Sogo and Justina Zukauskaite

Taking its title from late artist Jonas Mekas’ Manifesto Anti-100 years of Cinema, a performative exhibition in Tehran will unfold over two different episodes. Its main aim is to celebrate the unbound energy of collaborative work and friendship on the one hand and moments of reflection and stillness on the other. Its point of departure is the Manichean binary between darkness and light, as sine qua non condition for the existence of technologically mediated images.

First presented on February 11th, 1996, at the American Center in Paris, and published in the French periodical Point d’Ironie in 1997, Mekas’ Manifesto was a response to the celebration of the centenary of cinema, which throughout much of its history has been dominated by marketing and capital. Mekas here celebrates the poetic forms of cinema, the cinema of the independents and the avant-garde.

By building up organically chapter by chapter over two months, this exhibition will be a celebration of nomadic images that have travelled as fast as sound to then become materials that embody both lightness and gravity — not forgetting the metaphor of sound as the phenomena with which everything began. The broad and diverse selection of artists, living and working in the Far East and the West, in the fields between moving image film, video, sound, installation, drawing, photography, and poetry embrace Tehran as Middle East and resonating soundboard of universal human experience.

For the first chapter of the exhibition, a number of artists have been carefully selected by Raha Raissnia to accompany two of her own works. In the spirit of Mekas’s Manifesto, they are all friends whom she has known personally from many years of living and working in New York City. Their work involves a vigorous engagement with music, philosophy, poetry, science, ecology and history. Besides their work, it is their persona, attitude and unabating embrace of the unknown and the accidental which have had a profound influence on her. They all pursue a lifestyle and an ethical stance that aims to protect their integrity and independence from the accepted norms.

All of these works are connected in various ways to music, poetry and cinema. They possess rhythm, subtlety, atmosphere and an indistinct humor. Some of them are shrouded in melancholic darkness, an end-of-days monochrome which at the same time brings about a sense of freedom and detachment from the ordinary visible world. All of them compel reflection and speculation and exalt the imagination in ways unaffected and unbound.

In the second chapter of the exhibition, curator Martin Germann will introduce and insert new works that will expand on various attributes and notions in the first, engaging in dialogues that will be unpredictable and exuberant.

As part of the exhibition, there will be upcoming evening programs that will include an Expanded Cinema performance by Raha Raissnia, series of film screenings followed by discussions and poetry readings.