Curated by Amirali Ghasemi & Aman Askarizad

Images, sounds, memories, and shared actions connect people across distance and time. What is recorded, selected, and circulated also shapes whose experiences are heard and whose agency is recognized. This project brings artistic works and curatorial practices connected to Iran into conversation, asking how we might look and listen without reducing people’s lives to evidence for a predetermined account of war or protest, or turning their suffering into spectacle.
Moments of war and political uprisings produce competing narratives almost immediately. The urgency to document, explain and preserve what may disappear also shapes whose experiences become visible, especially when information is interrupted or contested. The illegal war on Iran, the January 2026 uprising and the mass killings and the continuing reverberations of Woman, Life, Freedom, poses a challenging position in how to act upon and how to encompass and respond without claiming to speak on behalf of those living through them. The project asks how we can preserve and re-read experiences while remaining accountable to the people they concern? What can we hold in common across disagreement without forcing these experiences into one story?

The program presents works by Bahar Aslani, Mahshid Afzali, Golara Jahanian, Farrokh Falsafi, Atefeh Kheirabadi & Mehrad Sepahnia, Mahoor Mirshakkak, Siavash Naghshbandi, Tarlan Lotfizadeh, Niyaz Saghari, Azade Shahmiri & Sin Seeni

Program:

7.10 — Opening and screening
A screening program followed by a conversation between Amirali Ghasemi and Aman Askarizad.
8.10 — Participatory curatorial workshop
Opposing / Contrary: On Adversarial Archive, led by Amirali Ghasemi.
Workshop details and how to participate: [link]21.10 — Launch of Bast
Reyhaneh Mirjahani will introduce Bast, a curatorial and research platform for studying, documenting and rethinking participatory art in Iran. The launch will be followed by a conversation with Bast’s co-founders Reyhaneh Mirjahani and Amirali Ghasemi with Aman Askarizad.

Bast.work

Bios:

Reyhaneh Mirjahani is an artist with curatorial practice, working at the intersection of visual art, artistic research, organizing, and publishing, focusing on participatory art. She uses collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to create dialogic spaces exploring agency, participation, counter-narratives, and spatial politics.

Aman Askarizad is an artist, curator, producer and photographer based in Vantaa, Finland. Working across performance art and lens-based media, his artistic and curatorial works explore the politics of representation, memory and the ethics of encountering others.

He is co-founder and co-curator of The Other Side, a Vantaa-based performance art platform. Through it, he has co-curated its 2024 and 2025 festivals, the One-Day Stand series and the Sidewalk Project. His concern with representation also extends to music. In 2020, he curated An Entry to Iranian Music, an eight-session program at the Museum of Impossible Forms that used Iranian music as a case study for encountering non-Western musical systems beyond reductive categories.

Amirali Ghasemi (b. 1980, Iran) is an independent curator, media artist, and graphic designer based in Berlin. In 1998, he founded Parkingallery, an independent project space in Tehran, and launched its online platform for young Iranian artists in 2002. His photography, video, and design works have been exhibited internationally. He holds a degree in Visual Arts from Central Tehran Azad University (2004) and pursued MA studies in "Art in Context" at the Berlin University of the Arts (2015–2017).

As a curator, Ghasemi has directed numerous Parkingallery initiatives Beyond his ongoing curatorial archive IRAN&CO, he has guest-programmed for major international film festivals in Rotterdam (IFFR), Göteborg, and Beijing.

Ghasemi has consistently built alternative artistic platforms. He co-founded the New Media Society (2014), a research platform and library; the MOTAVALI Performance Platform (2020); and the nomadic artist-run space Room for Doubt, which launched in Tehran in 2022 and relocated to Berlin in May 2023.

Currently, he is developing photographic, archival, and time-based media projects, alongside writing on early Iranian video and new media art. His latest curatorial project, What the Land Remembers: Counter-Archives from Iran, drawn from the Parking Video Library, is currently on view at the Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts in Brussels (September 2026 – February 2027).