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Ehsan Fardjadniya

September 6th-16th 2018

Workshop and talk with Jack Spittle
September 13th, 7 pm
Spazio 13, Via Colonnello de Cristoforis, 8, Bari

Ehsan Fardjadniya considers art and culture as a catalyst for change through progressive subversion towards justice and emancipation from oppression. As an artist, he positions himself as a social agent of new becoming. This could be related both to his earlier experience of fleeing Iran in 2000 and finding his artistic position again, within a new society.
Those experiences made Ehsan Fardjadniya aware of the power apparatuses, their mechanisms of domination, systems of racial and class exclusion and the function of satirical, critical and emancipatory art. How can the very art that brought to this position emancipate people and other similar subjects? The work of Ehsan aims to explore and scrutinize the role and use of art and art activism, with a particular focus on decoding societal mechanisms and making them dysfunctional, e.g. through the formation of new public spaces, however temporary, for artistic and poetic resistance and emancipatory movements. Most of his work unfolds via performances and interventions in public space as well as social sculptures and participatory platforms and installations.

As part of IIM Ehsan will explore issues related to migration in Puglia, often connected to the exploitation of migrant labour and to visible and invisible economies, while encountering self-organised projects and initiatives that seek to define different fields of autonomy. In this inquiry, the artist will be accompanied by Jack Spittle, one of the members of Radio Ghetto Voci Libere .

BIO

Ehsan Fardjadniya is an Iranian artist, founder, filmmaker, initiator of Stateless Immigrants Pavilion in Venice and Pirate Cinema in the Netherlands. In year 2000, he had to leave Iran as a political refugee due to his proclivities for art and activistic practices and since then he works and lives in Amsterdam and London. He has completed his BA art education at Royal College of Fine Art The Hague in 2006 and Master of Fine Arts at the Goldsmiths University of London in 2008. His work includes participatory art, interventions in public space, performance, video art and experimental cinema.