Call for Artists: International Juried Exhibition—Focus Iran: Contemporary Photography and Video (Deadline: 21 September 2014)

Call for Artists: International Juried Exhibition—Focus Iran: Contemporary Photography and Video (Deadline: 21 September 2014)

Call for Artists: International Juried Exhibition—Focus Iran: Contemporary Photography and Video (Deadline: 21 September 2014)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

For Immediate Release

Contact: Sasha Ali | Exhibitions Manager

pr@cafam.org | 323.937.4230 x25

Call for Artists: International Juried Exhibition—Focus Iran: Contemporary Photography and Video

LOS ANGELES — The Craft & Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) and Farhang Foundation announce a collaboration for a juried exhibition of contemporary photography and video works relating to Iranian culture and heritage. The exhibition Focus Iran: Contemporary Photography and Video is an opportunity to expose and feature emerging and mid-career photographers and media artists from around the world.

Approximately 25 selected photographs and videos will be displayed in a group exhibition to take place at the Craft & Folk Art Museum from January 25 to May 3, 2015. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, January 24.

"We are thrilled to create this international platform for emerging and mid-career artists to showcase their work in Los Angeles as we celebrate the beauty and richness of Iranian art and culture as the focus of this exhibition," says Farhang Foundation Chair of Fine Arts Council, Roshi Rahnama.

"A well-crafted photograph begins with a vision. With this collaboration between CAFAM and the Farhang Foundation we wish to inspire a thoughtful point of view on the relationships and reflections that artists across the world have with Iranian culture," says CAFAM Executive Director Suzanne Isken.

Artists 18 years of age and older are invited to apply between July 21 and September 21, 2014. A qualified panel of jurors will consider each photograph or video submission`s pertinence to Iranian culture and heritage, originality, skill, artistic vision, and execution. Only digital format entries will be eligible, with a maximum of three photographs and/or one video entry per artist. All entries will be processed through the free online service CaFÉ at www.callforentry.org. Entries that are sent directly to the Craft & Folk Art Museum or Farhang Foundation will be disqualified.

Selected photographs and videos will be printed and framed or transferred to DVD by the Craft & Folk Art Museum for exhibition display. The complete rules of submission can be found at www.farhang.org/focusiran or www.cafam.org/exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/

Jurors

Steven Albahari is the founder and publisher of 21st Editions, a press for hand-crafted journals and monographs of photographic art. Each handmade monograph is illustrated with original signed photographs and incorporates new writing by the artists themselves, leading contemporary historians, critics, poets, novelists, and philosophers. Made one at a time, 21st Editions` titles use the finest papers, bindings, and printing techniques that range from classically elegant letterpress to the most advanced offset processes available today.

Ala Ebtekar is a San Francisco-based visual artist known primarily for his paintings, drawings, and installations that explore the juncture between history and myth, while melding Persian mythology, science, philosophy and pop culture together. Receiving his BA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002 and his MFA degree from Stanford University in 2006, his work has been widely exhibited internationally and throughout the United States in such shows as "One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now," a touring exhibition originating at the Asia Society, NYC, "2006 California Biennial" at the Orange County Museum of Art, and most recently in "The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989" at the ZKM - Museum for Contemporary Art in Germany.

Cat Jimenez is the Executive Director of the Lucie Foundation, Executive Producer of the Lucie Awards and Co-Founder of the Month of Photography Los Angeles (MOPLA). She studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and was featured in the Smithsonian Institute and The Los Angeles Filipino American Centennial Commemoration Committee Project entitled "I am Today`s Filipino," recognizing and preserving the stories of individuals making a contribution to American life.

Organizing Institutions

Situated on historic Museum Row since 1973, the Craft & Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) is an invaluable contributor to Los Angeles culture, exhibiting current artists with intriguing perspectives and distinctive practices. CAFAM offers consistently unexpected exhibitions of compelling artwork that takes traditional techniques in new, often surprising directions. Hosted hands-on workshops make the Craft & Folk Art Museum a place to see art and make art – all under one roof. Uncommon discoveries are guaranteed as well at the Craft & Folk Art Museum Shop, which offers an expertly curated array of handmade items from skilled artisans. The intimate, atypical museum space and independent spirit at CAFAM combine to create an atmosphere of genuine excitement and delight. Step inside, and become a part of what’s happening at CAFAM. For more information, visit www.cafam.org.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412