Artipedia - Arts News

NEVER BEEN TO TEHRAN

NEVER BEEN TO TEHRAN

A worldwide online and offline exhibition organized by Jon Rubin and Andrea Grover
October 19 - November 16, 2007
http://www.neverbeentotehran.com

EXHIBITION VENUES: Parkingallery, Tehran, Iran; Caravansarai, Istanbul, Turkey; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, USA; Media and Interdisciplinary Arts Center, Auckland, New Zealand; Koh-I-Noor, Copenhagen, Denmark; Mess Hall, Chicago, USA; Pittsburgh Cultural Trust (Downtown Electronic Jumbotron), Pittsburgh, USA; Embryosalon, Berlin, Germany; and on the web at http://www.NeverBeenToTehran.com

NEVER BEEN TO TEHRAN, organized by artist Jon Rubin and curator Andrea Grover, is a worldwide exhibition with 29 international participants who, for one month, are contributing photographs of what they imagine the city of Tehran to look like, to a universal photo-sharing website. The photographs are streamed to each participating exhibition venue as an evolving projected slideshow, with additional images uploaded daily throughout the exhibition.

Exhibition Description: Imagine a city that you’ve only seen in reproductions or perhaps have merely heard about. A place, like many others, that only exists for you through indirect sources–the nightly news, hearsay, literature, magazines, movies, and the Internet. Using these secondhand clues as firsthand research materials, invited worldwide participants–who have Never Been to Tehran–take photographs (from their home base) of what they imagine Tehran to look like. Anything that anyone might take a photograph of is fair game, just as long as it feels like Tehran.

As Tehran’s image is regularly depicted in the dominant media, it is a compelling challenge for the participants in this exhibition to sift through the glut of pictures and information to cull out a personally constructed version of an unfamiliar place. For viewers in Tehran, the exhibition presents a chance to witness an unusual mirroring of their globally projected image, taken from the daily lives and environs of outsiders. Collectively, the artists and viewers of Never Been to Tehran will be charting a liminal space stuck somewhere between here and there that in our contemporary existence just might be home.

“The challenge for each participant in this exhibition is to look for a common ground between their city and someone else’s–to blend fact with fiction. It’s a bit like after you read a great book. There is a period of time when the story of the book bleeds into your own life. This daydreaming, in-between state, to which the contributors to this exhibition periodically submit themselves, is an important way of looking at the after-effects of an accelerated information culture.”– Jon Rubin and Andrea Grover

Participants: Dean Baldwin, Canada; Aideen Barry, Ireland; Cedric Bomford, Canada; Otto Von Busch, Sweden and Turkey; James Charlton, New Zealand; Sara Graham, Canada; Andrea Grover, USA; Deniz Gul, Turkey; Greg Halpern and Ahndraya Parlato, USA; Levin Haegele, England; Rumana Husain, Pakistan; Jun’ichiro Ishii, France; Martin Krusche, Austria; Rosie Lynch, Germany; Francesco Nonino, Italy; Elena Perlino, Italy; Heidi Hove Pedersen, Denmark; Sal Randolph, USA; Alia Rayya, Israel/Palestinian Territories; Jon Rubin, USA; Carli and Jakob Hoffmann, Germany; Iyallola Tillieu, Belgium; Keiko Tsuji, Japan; Lee Walton, USA; Lindsey White, USA; Christian Sievers, Germany; Zoe Strauss, USA

Photo credits: Heidi Hove Pedersen, Denmark; Keiko Tsuji, Japan; Greg Halpern and Ahndraya Parlato, USA; Jon Rubin, USA; Rumana Husain, Pakistan; Elena Perlino, Italy; Iyallola Tillieu, Belgium; Otto Von Busch, Sweden and Turkey.

Contact: Andrea Grover and Jon Rubin
info@neverbeentotehran.com
713-868-2101

Greenhouse Britain

Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, 2007

GREENHOUSE BRITAIN: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom

New work by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison
and Harrison Studio Associates (Britain): David Haley, Chris Fremantle, Gabriel Harrison.
November 2007 - Spring 2008
Devon, London, Shrewsbury, Manchester, Bristol, and Lancaster.
Harrison Studio & Associates (Britain)
+44 (0)7714 203016
info@greenhousebritain.net

http://www.greenhousebritain.net

We believe that the cultural landscape is largely formed by the dominant cultures of a place. It is formed by a sometimes conflicted, sometimes consensual discourse or narrative from an array of stories, observations and intentions, first spoken by people of these dominant cultures and thereafter enacted on the ground. To our view, such a story has certain fluidity about it, and may change directions for any number of reasons. This work, Greenhouse Britain, is designed literally to express what the rising of waters would mean to the landscape of the island. It takes the 3 positions: of defense, withdrawal and then defense, and withdrawal to the high grounds.

We suggest that the existing plans for greenhouse emissions control will be insufficient to keep temperature rise at 2 degrees or less. In fact, we believe that the tipping point is past. In this context, the rising ocean becomes a form determinant. By “form determinant”, we mean, the rising ocean will determine many of the new forms that culture, industry and many other elements of civilization will have to take.

There is another piece of this picture that we wish to give voice to. That is, up until this present rising of the world oceans, the creators of Western civilization have held and enacted the belief that all limitations in the physical world, particularly in the ecological world, are there to be used and overcome. We think that the rising ocean is an opportunity for transformation, but it is exactly the reverse of a new frontier to overcome from civilization’s perspective. Now, from the ocean’s perspective, its boundary is perhaps a continuing, evolving transforming new frontier. Therefore, assuming a rapid rise of waters, even for a modest 5 meters in 100 years, there are apparently no models of precedence, no information, design, nor planning on the table, with the exception of ocean defenses and typical development models, albeit more energy efficient ones. It is the intention of this exhibition to begin generating the thinking, the design, perhaps the new belief stru
cture, perhaps even indicating new economic structures that may be required for the democratic dispersal of support for an upward-moving population within the context of a gradually shrinking landmass.

The research and production of Greenhouse Britain has been funded by the UK Government Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs’ Climate Change Challenge Fund: Tomorrow’s Climate — Today’s Challenge.

The programme has also been funded and supported by a range of other agencies including Gunpowder Park’s Bright Sparks programme, MIRIAD at Manchester Metropolitan University, The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and The University of Sheffield’s Landscape Department.

Key partners include the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at University of Southampton; the Landscape Department at the University of Sheffield; MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University; and the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research at North Wyke, Devon.

Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Devon
17 November - 23 December 2007
London Wildlife Trust
9 and 10 November 2007 annual conference
Darwin Festival, Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery
1 - 27 February 2008
Holden Gallery, Manchester Metropolitan University
14 February - 14 March 2008
Knowle West Media Centre, Bristol
7 March - 4 April 2008
Storey Gallery, Lancaster
Spring 2008 to be confirmed

Events:
Lecture & panel discussion 26 November 2007, Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World in association with the University of Plymouth.

Presentation of proposals 30th November 2007, Gunpowder Park, Essex
Seminar 26 February 2008, Darwin Festival and Shrewsbury Museums