Words on Water, Screening and Online Talk
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- Nebras Hoveizavi – Sometime In January or Maybe June
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- Allahyar Najafi – Row
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- Jaleh Nesari – A study in sound intensity in water, Lab: Aras And Caspian
Room for Doubt – Berlin in collaboration with Studio One and Parking Video Library
With Nebras Hoveizavi, Allahyar Najafi & Jaleh Nesari Curated by Amirali Ghasemi
Saturday, May 27, 2023
18:30 Doors Open
19:00 Introduction & Welcome
19:15 to 20:30 Screening & Online Talk
Words on Water is the 1st series of Room For Doubt programs, which brings together three artistic positions on Water, and its essential role in our life now tinted with political, environmental, and economic readings: Water as a conveyer of the streams of goods (Hoveizavi), as a dividing/silencing border (Nesari) and as black/blank canvas to experiment verbally and visually (Najafi). The three works selected for this screening pinpoint three often troubled waterfronts located around a geographical territory of what is known as contemporary Iran: The Aras River, the Caspian Sea, and the Persian Gulf.
Special thanks to Sara Boroujeni & Latika Gupta
Studio One: Eisenbahnstraße 4, 10997 Berlin
Sometime in January or Maybe June
Nebras Hoveizavi | Video | Sound | 17:00 | 2016
Sometime in January or maybe June, Nakhuda Mammad was singing his songs while juggling fabrics. It was sometime in June when I was born out of textiles made by a loom.
Through the lens of my mother's phone archives, the video offers a tantalizing glimpse into the intricate world of smuggling within Iran. Its purpose extends beyond the mere dissemination of information, deliberately cloaked in an ethereal tapestry of ambiguity that invites the audience to explore the mysterious depths of this complex subject. It is a narrow piece of moving poetry that was almost impossible to make using the flow of time and place as they would in a dream stage.
Row
Allahyar Najafi | Video | Sound | 5:28 | 2016
Music can be both a narrator and an archive of human evolution over time—producing narratives in a different language that speaks of a fixed path in different ways.
A study in sound intensity in water, Lab: Aras and Caspian
Jaleh Nesari | Video | Sound | 5:50 | 2019
The speed of sound in water is approximately 4-5 times greater than in air. It means sound is much stronger in water than it is in air! So a whisper that is not heard out of the water and is ignored or passes by as if a moment of silence, can be heard underwater. On the other hand, a sound that seems normal out of the water would be stronger under the essence.
The video is made out of amateur footage shared on social media. It is about the longstanding relationship between Iran and Azerbaijan. It focuses on water boundaries: the Aras and Caspian. While the borders separate two nations, the water reveals the voices of lovers apart from each other because of the borders; the voices can’t be heard in society, and generally are ignored by politics.