I Am Standing in the Middle of the Information Highway and Laughing – – (2nd Phase)

Curated by Raha Raissnia with Martin Germann

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.

I am standing the in the middle of the information highway and laughing —

because a butterfly on a little flower somewhere, somewhere, just fluttered its wings and I know that the whole course of history will drastically change because of that flutter —

While the first part of this exhibition took the geo-cultural perspective of Tehran to look toward the West as the home of Raissnia’s many artist friends, the second chapter, curated by Martin Germann, sets Tehran as the metaphorical center of a permanent flux of ideas of East and West.

Conceived as an addition to the show, it presents works by four contemporary artists concerned with the expanded histories of cinema, individual and collective trauma and visual memory, as well as aspects of structural miscommunication embedded in the production and circulation of technological images. What binds the practices of Marco Fusinato, James T. Hong, Tiffany Sia, and Sam Lewitt is the thin artistic terrain between signal and noise in which they all operate, in a critical and distinctively conceptual manner. But one could also connect their work with the aesthetic conviction of what has been called “universalism from below”: an idea of universalism which is grounded in the experiences, struggles, and perspectives of common people, of everyday civilians, rather than what is imposed from above by authorities, political elites and institutions.