Two multimedia performance-lectures by the DARKMATTER Collective. Mohamad Khezri Moghadam and dancer Saman will together do a performance piece based on an ethnographic photo series shot in Iran. Edward Akintola Hubbard and acclaimed Cabo Verdean acoustic musician Tcheka will together do a live performance piece.
The DARKMATTER Collective, a locally-based artist collective with direct, personal and ongoing intellectual interest in this ever-evolving, hybrid discipline of ethnography. DARKMATTER has an intimate connection to ethnography as an artistic practice. Its artistic director Edward Akintola Hubbard is an anthropologist and practitioner of experimental ethnography. He has taught the practice at New York University (New York and Shanghai campuses) and later at Utrecht University. Several of the co-founders of DARKMATTER were his students who went on to become practitioners themselves.
PROGRAMME
- THE THIRTEENTH DAY (BY MOHAMAD KHEZRI MOGHADAM) DARKMATTER’s Mohamad Khezri Moghadam will present a performance lecture in tandem with a slideshow of his ethnographic photo series The Thirteenth Day (shot near Kerman, Iran in 2019-2022). Iranian performance artist Hosein Danesh Pazhooh will interpret the images to the sound of Persian music.
Four years ago, in a location near Moghadam’s hometown of Kerman, a group of amateur Shia artists began the construction of several very elaborate installations on a large public complex. The installations are composed of statues and mannequins that reconstruct different epic scenes during the day of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. The complex is now in a state of neglect as construction there had ceased since Iran’s Coronavirus lockdown and never resumed. Some of the statues have even begun to slowly disappear or be removed by local authorities.
Shia Muslims believe that women have played a significant heroic role in the victory of Islam and this installation project was specifically intended to honour the women in battle during the day of the martyrdom. In every installation, however, the Shia artists chose to install hijab-clad male mannequins and statues to represent the female characters in the epic. The Thirteenth Day explores this instance of darkly comical irony, emblematic of the whole of Iranian society, that is produced by the imposition of sharia law since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. - TROPICAL CYBERPUNK (BY EDWARD AKINTOLA HUBBARD) DARKMATTER’s Edward Akintola Hubbard along with Angolan-Portuguese sound artist and performer Tristany Mundu will present a recitation of his experimental writing along with a slide-show of his most recent ethnographic photo series Tropical Cyberpunk (shot in Kingston Jamaica in 2023). The slideshow will provide the backdrop for Mundu’s avant-garde performance and sonic interpretations.
Cyberpunkis a sub-genre of science fiction typically set in a dystopian future cityscape teeming with advanced technology, saturated with neon lights and plagued with crime, social inequality and crumbling infrastructure. The photo series Tropical Cyberpunk views Kingston and its environs through the lens of dystopian futurism. Part visual ethnography, part world-building, these images collectively re-imagine the city as a high-tech, otherworldly metropolis in all its beauty and squalor, nestled in lush vegetation and awash in iridescent hues.
Tropical Cyberpunk is a critique of the post-colonial state and its failure to deliver on the utopian promise of national independence, but it is also a vibrant celebration of the creativity and resilience of the Jamaican people who continuously make and remake this dynamic, fast-moving and highly innovative urban culture.
EYE on Art 