Tuesday July, 4th - 6 PM
Other Colors
6:00-7:00 pm Film screening, introduced by Hannah Jacobi7:00-7:45 pm Hybrid talk with inputs, followed by Q&A with the audience.Remote with Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda for CBI (tbc), Amirali Ghasemi for PVL, and Shokoufeh Eftekhar e Zolfar Hassib, members of Shur Collective. On-site moderation by Hannah Jacobi.
If you can't be at the MAO in Turin, you can watch the screening and the artists' talk as a live stream at www.mohit.art
Free admission.
The screening program Other Colors refers to the ways in which color and color classifications have been used as a technique of Othering throughout modernity and into the present. Following the recurring themes of the exhibition Tradu/izioni d'Eurasia Reloaded, it takes color and color symbolism as a starting point to unlearn orientalist, racist, and othering color systems and to imagine an aesthetic that leads to new social meanings.
Art historian and author Hannah Jacobi invited three collectives and archives to contribute videos and films for the screening program. It will open with the short film White Horse by Lida Abdul (2006).
Collective for Black Iranians (CBI) produces creative and critically conscious content that proposes an Iranian culture fully at its Black and African intersections. For Other Colors, the collective will present a series of micro and short films that weave black Iranian narratives to resist racial erasure and write, Siyah Zibast, Black is Beautiful. With films and voices by Ebrahim Albo, Pegah Bahadori, Sarah Farajzadeh, Hosna, Melika Khorsandipor, and Priscillia Kounkou-Hoveyda.
Parking Video Library (PVL, Tehran/Berlin) is an archive of moving image and video art from the 1980s to the present. Bahar Ahmadifard and Amirali Ghasemi curated for PVL the collection Towards Colorlessness: Martin Shamoonpour's vibrant and colorful Kaleidoscope (2011) transitions to Morteza Soorani's stark monochrome expressions in GPS (2017). The program shifts to Mansoore Ghasemi's muted hues in her two short films from 2023, A Soft Revenge and Where Are the Potter, Seller, Buyer?, terminating with Hoda Amin's introspective piece The Hours (2016) in which we witness a woman meticulously cleaning the floor of her home, her thoughts drifting, striving for a pristine state reminiscent of its first day. Towards Colorlessness encapsulates this fading transition while addressing pressing social, environmental, and therefore political grievances.
Shur Collective brings together PoC queer-feminist, interdisciplinary artists and activists who, coming from diverse backgrounds, share a common political perspective through art, space, and interaction. In their articulation of Other Colors, dehumanization, Shur Collective brings the impact of human emotions to the forefront: “Dehumanization” deprives people of empathy and distances them from their emotions. Whatever happens to the Other does not evoke an emotional response. By removing the "de," “humanization” means restoring the emotions and empathy inherent in being human. This recurring theme of reconnecting with human emotions is evident in the films selected, which range from Kabul to Berlin: Salar Pashtoonyar’s Hills & Mountains (2022), Berlin Kabul by Frishteh Sadati and Lin Xin (2021), and Shokoufeh Eftekhar’s Fiktionsbescheinigung (2023).
Hannah Jacobi is an art historian and author specializing in global art. She is co-founder of mohit.art, a transcultural network of cooperation and platform for art and dialog between West Asian and European art contexts.
