Join us on Wednesday, January 4 for an evening of informal conversations هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini (translated from Farsi as “sitting together”) in solidarity and kinship with our Afghan and Iranian siblings. We come together as artists and organizers in the diaspora, to share, amplify, and weave together a trajectory of long-lasting cultural and political gender/sexual oppression in Iran and Afghanistan. In the tradition of a هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini event, we will use our personal and collective memories and stories as points of departure to raise awareness and imagine together, alongside audience members, what a transnational feminist approach might look like.
Beyond the shared histories of patriarchal violence and control over our bodies, the current parallel political events unfolding in Iran and Afghanistan are reminders that the closer and more attuned we are to one another’s struggles, the more forceful our actions can be in building new models of sisterhood.
As we enter the fourth month of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolution in Iran, sparked by the killing of 22-year-old Kurdish Jina (Mahsa) Amini in the hands of the regime’s police, the Taliban government has seized power in Afghanistan resulting in a ban and further violence preventing girls from attending school and universities (among other edicts restricting women’s lives). Both the Islamic Republic Regime and Taliban use violence and constraints on women’s bodies, freedom of choice, and movement. As we center feminism in the fight against patriarchy and dictatorship, we equally see feminist struggles as struggles against all modes of oppression, including ethnicity, class, and religion. We are not free, until we are all free.
Jin. Jîyan. Azadî.
Womxn. Life. Freedom.
This event is held in conjunction with the exhibition Always In My Heart, curated by Muheb Esmat and currently on view at Smack Mellon.
***هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini is a discussion and storytelling series with a focus on the global south, organized by Morehshin Allahyari since 2017.
Participating Artists
Shiraz Fazli
Bahareh Khoshooee
Nooshin Rostami
Zelikha Zohra Shoja
Organized and moderated by Morehshin Allahyari.
BIOS
Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: موره شین اللهیاری), is a NY based Iranian-Kurdish artist using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of SWANA. Her work has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops at venues throughout the world, including the New Museum, MoMa, Centre Pompidou, Venice Biennale di Architecture, and Museum für Angewandte Kunst among many others. Her artworks are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Current Museum.
Shiraz Fazli is an artist and educator born and based in Brooklyn, New York. In textiles and illustration, she visualizes the ghosts of the past and the tensions of being an Afghan in the United States. In doing so, she finds inspiration in the constantly changing landscape of time. Her menacing figures entangle with each other as they overlap, collide, and multiply over abstract spaces, demonstrating humanity’s inherent interconnectivity through the chaos. Her work has been exhibited at Bard College, ReflectSpace Gallery , and The Living Gallery, among others. She holds a B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Bard College.
Bahareh Khoshooee is a multidisciplinary artist born in Tehran, Iran in 1991, the year the Internet was made available for unrestricted commercial use. She uses digital time-based strategies in presenting work that fuses video, projection mapping, sculpture, text, sound and performance to explore the un-capturable qualities of her diasporic body, fragmented culture, and transnational identity. Khoshooee has presented her multimedia installations at Baxter St CCNY, The Elizabeth Foundation for The Arts (The Immigrant Artist Biennial), The Orlando Museum of Art, NADA MIAMI 2018, Elsewhere (New York), Housing (New York), and Rawson Projects (New York). She attended Skowhegan School of Art and Painting in 2018.
Nooshin Rostami is an artist, designer, and educator. They work with a glossary of materials and terms: light, shadows, reflections, structures, landscape, space, and place. They refer to these vocabularies within many different contexts both physical and metaphorical, to point to ways of seeing and connecting outside of textual or verbal language. They received an MFA from Brooklyn College-CUNY (2011) and have exhibited their work in solo and group settings internationally including Holographic Center (2020), California Museum of Photography (2019), Jardines de Mexico (2019), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition -LACE (2018), Queens Museum (2018), among others.
Zelikha Zohra Shoja is an interdisciplinary artist based on Onundagaonoga territory (Syracuse, New York). Her practice is engaged in communal storytelling in the Afghan diaspora, gham-khoori/grief-work, and post-memory, or the transmission of memory. Through performance, she re-stages and re-enacts moments towards an embodied archive. By playing with touch and emphasizing gesture through moving image and participatory installations, she explores how collective experiences can be transferred, mirrored, and felt by others. She holds a BA in Diaspora Studies from George Mason University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Art Video from Syracuse University. Her work has shown at The Living Gallery (New York, NY), Governors Island (New York, NY), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), New Wight Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Khodynka Gallery (Moscow, Russia); Worth Ryder Gallery (Berkeley, CA); among others.
Always In My Heart is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York City Council Member Lincoln Restler, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, many individuals and Smack Mellon’s Members.
Research for this exhibition was made possible by the generous support of The Gerda Henkel Foundation. Smack Mellon would like to thank Kelly and Adam Leight for their contribution.
Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and with generous support from The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc., and Exploring The Arts. In-kind donations are provided by Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
Smack Mellon would like to extend a special thanks to all of the individuals, foundations, and businesses who have contributed to the NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund.