In the frame of the exhibition “Tracing movement(s) in uncertain times”, the Goethe-Institut in Exile will host a back-to-back session featuring “Women, Life, Freedom: Victory over the Sun”, a new lecture by Iranian artist Barbad Golshiri. This lecture will be followed by a conversation between German-Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar and the art historian Hannah Jacobi.
This session invites two prominent figures in Iranian contemporary arts who raise their voices for justice and freedom not only through their artistic practice but also through their life-long dedication to political activism in writing, documenting, archiving, and curating. The lecture and talk address urgent questions such as how art and activism relate to each other and how art connects with resistance through the act of remembrance and the practice of archiving. Artists, thinkers, and intellectuals realize monuments, texts, and actions that help keeping resistant and revolutionary movements alive and that echo and enrich our collective memory of decades of struggle until today. Finally, how to connect emancipatory movements in different contexts to the current struggle for woman, life, freedom in Iran?
About the lecture:
A concise history of the divinely inspired Imams, Sultans, Kings, and Emirs: what repeats itself throughout our history is that a mystical light legitimizes the leadership of a ruler. This tradition shows that God sanctions just leaders with a radiant light. The Women, Life, Freedom Revolution has attacked this light.
The artist and activist
Parastou Forouhar was born in 1962 in Tehran, Iran. After studying art at the University of Tehran, she escaped censorship and pressure to conform and continued her studies in Germany from 1991. She has been a professor of fine arts at the Kunsthochschule Mainz since 2019. As a conceptual artist, Parastou Forouhar uses all media, from drawing to photography to computer-animated sequences. In her work, Parastou Forouhar combines the beauty of ornamentation with system-critical and provocative content.
Barbad Golshiri, born 1982 in Tehran, Iran, studied painting in Tehran. For more than two decades he has worked in different fields and is considered a multidisciplinary artist. He has had more than a hundred exhibitions. Golshiri’s focus in the past few years has been on cemeteries and making of grave markers, cenotaphs and memorials, especially for the victims of the Islamic Regime. He is also an activist, a critic and a translator of Samuel Beckett’s dramatic works into Persian. His works are in such collections as the British Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Freiburg Modern Art Museum, South Florida University Museum, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, and cemeteries in Iran, France, and Canada. He now resides in exile in France.
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