Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Session 6: May 8 – July 2, 2009

Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi live in Rotterdam and pursue an art practice both in Iran and the Netherlands. They began Pages in 2004, which consists of art projects, and a bilingual Farsi/English magazine. With Pages they try to create possibilities for reflecting on politically and socially contingent conditions of cultural practice in order to generate a space of criticality. Their work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Latin America, the United States, the Middle East, and throughout Europe.

The Isle, Sunset Square at Kish Island, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, 2009
Photo Credit: Joshua White

While in Los Angeles, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi researched Los Angeles-based Iranian satellite television stations for a video project-in-development, entitled Satellite Geography: as long as it is aiming at the sky. When completed, this film will address aspects of the tele-visual mediation and production of geographical and communal identity and politics. Tabatabai and Afrassiabi met with representatives of 20 satellite TV stations that broadcast television programming internationally in the Farsi language. The majority of the audience for such programming lives inside Iran. Through their project, Tabatabai and Afrassiabi wish to consider what is retained through such TV programs, which exhibit a twofold geographical, political and cultural identity that is predicated by ambivalence of here/there, now/then, and now and the eventual future, identified and elaborated by both the audiences living in and outside of Iran.

As another part of their UFI experience, Tabatabai and Afrassiabi created an exhibition at the Schindler House entitled The Isle. The Isle is about the architectural and political incongruities of an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf called Kish. This presentation is the third and final part of a project by the artists, begun in 2005 with the installation Sunset Cinema and continued in 2007 with Undecided Utopia. Through videos, models, and re-appropriation of found documents, The Isle re-articulates the unresolved instances of Kish’s modernization into representations of unfulfilled desires as symptoms of modernity manifested in ambivalent architecture not destined to take form. It was on view May 28 – August 23, 2009.

Exhibition reception for “The Isle,” 5/27/09. UFI Fellow and artist Nasrin Tabatabai with guest

Exhibition reception for “The Isle,” 5/27/09. UFI Fellow and artist Babak Afrassiabi with guests

Exhibition reception for “The Isle” by UFI Fellows Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, 5/27/09. Guest views “Sunset Square at Kish Island” (2006)

Pages Public Presentation, 6/30/09

Exhibition reception for “The Isle,” 5/27/09. At left: UFI Fellows and artists Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai with photographer Patricia Parinejad, MAK Center Director Kimberli Meyer, and MAK Art and Architecture Residents Rainer Prohaska, Bernhard Wolf, and Elke Uitentuis