ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Book presentation at PLAY_platform for film & video BerlinShahram Entekhabi and Franco Marinotti kindly invite you to the presentation of the first issue of the artistís book project:
One Person's Trash is another Person's Treasure
a book by Shahram Entekhabi
published by
Fine Arts Unternehmen Books AG | Obmoos 4 | CH-6301 Zug | book@artisart.com www.twoogroup.com
Presentation
on: Saturday, February 9, 2008, 7 p.m.
at: PLAY_platform for film & video Berlin
Torstrasse 218| D-10115 Berlin | +49 30 23 45 57 53, f -4 | s.barrila@twoogroup.com | www.twoogroup.com
press contact: Hannah Jacobi | +49 30 23 45 57 53 | mobile +49 179 27 63 910 | h.jacobi@twoogroup.com
One Person's Trash is another Person's Treasure | Issue 1/2008 | Part 1: Humour and the Modern Clown | Part 2: Muscles and Masculinities
Editor: Franco Marinotti | Publisher: Fin Arts Unternehmen Books AG, Zug, Switzerland | Art Direction: wondering_solo, Milan, Italy | Language: English | Pages: 128 | ISBN-10 3-03720-010-3 | ISBN-13 978-3-03720-010-0
EAN 9783037200100
The first issue includes texts by Kathrin Becker (head of the Video Forum in the NBK, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein) | Doris Berger (art critic and curator based in Berlin) | Franco Marinotti (director of Fine Arts Unternehmen Books AG) | Interviews with Nat Muller (independent curator and critic, Rotterdam, The Netherlands) | Kea Wienand (art historian, Oldenburg and Trier, Germany)
Project description:
The artist and the publisher develop over the period of two years a series of four magazine-like artistís books on different subjects related to the work of Shahram Entekhabi: Humour and the Modern Clown / Muscles and Masculinities, Faith and religion / Orient and Occident, Private history and relationship / Migration and migrating media, Art and Architecture / Style and Trash. Bringing together two subjects in each issue, the books are published biannually.
Excerpt from the foreword of the first issue:
I KNOW SHAHRAM SINCE QUITE A LONG TIME...
... both, as a friend and as an artist.
We worked together on several projects: exhibitions, fairs, films, videos, performances and I have been for him at the same time producer, gallerist and publisher. I have always been fascinated by his approach to art, simple or complex as it may have been.
His very particular behaviour, how he even handles the most controversial socio political issues his work strongly deals with, amused me, and made e think and laugh at the same time.
What sort of behaviour you may ask. A ìperformativeî one, I gather, strongly driven by his humour and irony towards his work and its content.
He was taking up physically through his body the entire burden of the consequences, related to the mostly quite dramatic content of his work.
I was definitely loosing reference between his person and his impersonal figurations, finding myself suddenly in a sort of puppetry environment, unable to identify puppets from puppeteer. The Islamic fundamentalist, the Kurdish activist, the guerilla guy, the criminal from the Balkans, all ìactingî in a setting almost out of their usual context, seem to be part of a geographical social and political demystification process. It looks like as if they were questioning their own status, making fun of themselves. Their drama becomes humour.
I was posing all these thoughts of mine to Shahram whilst dining one evening at ëVino e Librií in Berlin, and suddenly everything became more clear in my mind, and I told him: îyou know Shahram, you are a clown!î Although an official definition for ìmodern clownî doesnít really exist as such, I was quite happy about my ìdiscoveryî, but still somehow cautious about his possible reaction. But he said smiling whilst sipping a good glass of Barbaresco, ìyes Franco, you are right!î
We debated still for quite some time that evening.
We ended up deciding to start working on a book project. ìI need a bookî, Shahram said. ìIf you need oneî, I answered, ìits a catalogue, and I donít publish catalogues, if you want one, then it will be a projectî.
My idea was to give to this project the structure of a dynamic presentation about him as a clown, enabling the reader to ìnavigateî amongst all his various characters, thus revealing they have not been conceived as mere stereotypes for the sake of political propaganda but, instead, just part of a ìclownishî parody. By means of this the artist reveals himself towards issues such as political and social instability, migration, loss of cultural identities, as dramatic consequences of the globalisation process that makes many of us feel de-contextualized, and not belonging to anywhere anymore.
I decided to develop the editorial concept within four magazine-like issues, to be published semi-annually, each one investigating about two major topics part of his work.
Short biography of the artist:
Shahram Entekhabi (Berlin, Germany) was born in Iran, studied in Italy and now resides and works in Berlin. An artist and architect, his work has been the subject of many exhibitions all over the world. Shahramís practice is framed within an urban setting and diffuses the idea of the urban space being a reserve for the practice and performance of the white, middle class, hetro-sexual male. He explores these ideas via a variety of performative practices using architecture, installation and digital media. He chooses to highlight individuals who are ordinarily marginalized and made invisible or forced into self-ghettoization from the urban domain, such as migrant communities and their cultures, particularly the communities from the Middle East and its diaspora. The question of visibility and invisibility therefore is a theme he recurrently explores within his practice.
website: www.entekhabi.org
PLAY_platform for film & video Berlin
Torstrasse 218 | D-10115 Berlin | +49 30 23 45 57 53, f -4 | s.barrila@twoogroup.com www.twoogroup.com