Bidoun is sad to learn that Bahman Jalali passed away on Friday at the age of 65 in Tehran. Jalali was not only a photographer who captured the Iranian Revolution and the war that would ensue, but was also an avid and keen photo collector, as well as a beloved professor of photography whose legacy continues to be seen in the generations who followed him. We salute him and his memory.
January 10, 2010—February 10, 2010
the shelter
t +971.4.434 5655
p.o.box 11370
Dubai, UAE
In November 2009 Bidoun launched a new, monthly exhibition project aimed at highlighting the work of art photographers based in the UAE.
The Portfolio Project this month will be featuring two former students of the American University of Sharjah, Aisha Miyuki Ansari and Zeinab Hajian, both of whom were taught by AUS professor and artist Tarek Al Ghoussein. The novelty of compositional experimentation and thematic exploration that marks academic work in art photography distinguishes the January series from previous month’s artists Hind Mezaina and Mohamed Somji.
More information on the artists on the Portfolio Project’s page
Seh Mullah
Parviz Khatibi
Farsi (no subtitles)
1985, 53 min
Parviz Khatibi was an iconoclastic intellectual, active across countless media, who kept one foot in popular entertainment and the other in political activism. During the Shah’s regime, Khatibi relentlessly published a satirical weekly named Haji Baba despite harsh censorship and several arrests. After the Islamic revolution, Khatibi continued the publication of the paper both in Iran and later in exile in New York and Los Angeles. In the realm of popular culture, he was a successful playwright, a key figure in the golden years of Radio Iran where he hosted a popular four hour morning show, an accomplished film directer (over 20 pictures under his belt) and a successful songwriter. Most notably, he penned the lyrics to Vigen and Delkash’s Bordi Az Yadam – one of the most iconic songs of Persian pop history. His gift for sharp but poppy lyrics is evident in Seh Mullah (1985), a made-for-television satirical musical mocking the then leaders of the Islamic Republic. In characteristic Khatibi style, the play utilizes popular folk and joke musical tropes combined with found footage and video effects to voice fervent political commentaries. The mullahs, played by actors donning clumsy masks and fake beards, are often seen singing, dancing and being chastised by their wives. In one scene Khomeini, with a baseball bat in his lap, calls Saddam Hossein on the telephone to share his woes and suggest a war between their countries to solve all their problems. Khatibi himself appears throughout as a diegetic narrator.
Sunday April 19th, 2009 at 4pm
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue, New York
$8 in advance / $10 day-of-show
Bidoun and the Migrating Forms festival present a very rare and special screening of Parviz Kimiavi’s 1973 experimental satire, Moghollha (the Mongols).
Moghollha (The Mongols)
Parviz Kimiavi
16mm On Video / 92 min / 1973
Included in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s list of 1000 essential films, Parviz Kimiavi’s The Mongols (1973) is a leftfield satire and sharp commentary on the expanding presence of cinema and television in Iran. The story follows a filmmaker, played by Kimiavi himself and also named Parviz, as he struggles with both his own film and a looming assignment to oversee the installation of a television relay station in the remote province of Zahedan. Imbued by his wife’s thesis work on the Mongol invasion of Iran, Parviz’s anxieties coalesce and materialize in the form of surreal visions in which the origins of cinema are acted out by the Turkomans he hired to play Mongols in his own film. Together with Parviz, we watch as the would-be gang of Mongols wander the desert in search of their director and the answers to their pressing questions about the nature of cinema, all while the forthcoming introduction of television consumes the local village and its inhabitants. Kimiavi fashions a fantastical cinematic space rife with bizarre metaphoric imagery and Godardian references to film-making in order to draw a sarcastic parallel between the Mongol invasion and the hyper-accelerated modernization of 1970s Iran.
Twitter
Facebook