Immemorial
Performance Installation

Part of “Transient Works” A Collaborative Performative Laboratory

In this lab, the artist tried to create a new relationship between objects by gathering the old and new, obsolete and commonly used objects, undone or perfect, a relationship different from their monetary worth. The function of this lab was to bestow space and time to objects; examining to estimate their power of expression and the quality of their interactions based on objects' predictable or unpredictable gestures: slipping, scrubbing, immobility, stillness, disobedience, or steadiness. And I tried to be more of an observer and less of a leader in forming their visual narrative.

Objects sometimes accentuate a person's presence, sometimes remind and emphasize their absence. These left objects flow through time and connect us without speaking our language. But objects convey not only humans and their personal lives but also cultures; they are simultaneously evidence of our social life form and its architects. They do not solely establish a relationship among human beings; they establish relationships between humans and non-humans and above that between themselves. Every object has a story. They have concealed something in themselves and kept it alive. But what is the quality of the immediate presence of that object without considering its implications, without knowing its history and its past? What do unrelated objects do when they get together in a space they do not belong to?

These questions and thoughts were pursued through the performance installation Immemorial.

In collaboration with Leila Ahmadi Abadeh

Videos selected from the digital garden’s creations by The Sun Sets Eight Times A Day fellow artists: Youness Atbane, Lucy Ellinson, Maya Zbib, Lydia Ziemke

Transient Works

Transient Works is a fresh new seed cultivated in the digital garden at The Sun Sets Eight Times a Day. The idea of a collaborative lab and co-creating the artistic outcomes roots from the methodological approach of the SUN project in which eight artists from eight cultures and time zones collaborated to create a digital garden premiered in summer 2021.

In Transient Works, a collaborative performative laboratory, Azade Shahmiri, Isar Aboumahboub, Leila Ahmadi Abadeh, and Mehdi Mirmohamadi shared space for seven days to co-create. The artists worked on notions that have never had space to be actualized or even considered the past halfway ideas. Working in a shared environment and time is closely related to the notions of the social contract, care, joy, and playfulness that seem vital to be looked at in the time of pandemic and its unprecedented consequences that has changed and is changing the tools and modes of artistic creation, inevitably. After seven days, an audience in Tehran are invited to experience the works ranging from performance, installation to lecture and conversation at Pelart Institute.

For Transient Works the four artists based in Tehran developed a closed lab as a shared alternative space for creation. The artists have been meeting, discussing, and planning this experience collectively since November 2021. The lab was held in a form of four days of the closed experiment followed by three days of open studio visits to the audience and participants.

Tehran lab: 15 to 21 January 2022

Public Presentation: 19 - 21 January 2022



  →Transient Works Teheran-based Lab Website