Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

Exhibition by Lena Lapschina brings together video and media-based works that reflect on mobility, institutional frameworks, and transnational artistic practice, shaped through the artist’s long-term engagement with international exhibition contexts and residencies.

A six-session workshop facilitated by Ava Ansari and Molly Kleiman that examines how artists and educators engage public and private spaces through discussion, reading, and experimentation across local and transnational contexts.

Presentation by Doreen Mende examines exhibition-making as a political and spatial practice, foregrounding the temporal, institutional, and discursive conditions through which exhibitions produce knowledge and public meaning.

Iran: Art and Discourse – On Art Praxis was a public discussion held in New York on October 26, 2013, moderated by Shiva Balaghi. The conversation brought together artist Sohrab Kashani, the artist collective Slavs and Tatars, and anthropologist and media theorist Roxanne Varzi to reflect on artistic praxis and its implications within different social and political contexts. Over the course of the 82-minute discussion, the speakers examined how art operates as a site of discourse, intervention, and negotiation within societies shaped by power, ideology, and transnational exchange.

Presentation by Neil van der Linden introduces his decades-long engagement with cultural exchange across Asia and beyond, foregrounding the role of arts, music, and publishing as tools for sustained transnational collaboration.

Still Lives and Selected Acts brings together video works that use stillness, objects, and everyday scenes to register the suspended tensions and quiet negotiations of life in contemporary Iran.

SubTehran: Subjective Truth from Iran brings together artists working across photography, video, and conceptual practices to foreground personal, fragmented, and subjective narratives that complicate dominant representations of contemporary Iran.

Lost and Found in Iran presents contemporary Iranian video as a site of searching, where fragments of lived experience surface through acts of looking, recording, and remembering.

Small, About Everything presents Atousa Khalaj’s diaristic approach to painting and image-making, foregrounding fleeting, overlooked moments where ambiguity, intimacy, and everyday perception quietly surface and dissolve.

A screening of Ann Kaneko’s documentary examining artistic resistance, censorship, and perseverance under political repression in Peru, told through the lives and practices of four contemporary artists.

A modular exhibition and performative framework that rethinks protest, authorship, and symbolic action through the act of washing the flag, translating a historical gesture into a distributed, site-responsive, and networked form.

A public conversation in which the artist reflects on the exhibition and expands on its themes of conformity, power, and collective behavior through dialogue with the audience.

An exhibition reflecting on conformity, power, and collective blindness, using allegory and narrative to examine how individuals and societies follow authority toward collapse while mistaking obedience for safety.

An international video art screening curated by Kisito Assangni, bringing together artists from around the world to reflect on love as a political, social, and emotional force in times of precarity and constraint.

A presentation introducing algorithmic visualization as a meeting point of mathematics, computation, and visual art, demonstrating how polynomial equations generate aesthetic and conceptual forms across scientific and artistic contexts.

Yousha Bashir’s first solo exhibition presenting a process-driven body of work that explores tension, repetition, and rupture through construction, deconstruction, and material dualities.

A two-day hands-on workshop exploring tools and methodologies for creating interactive multimedia systems for performance, installation, and live collaboration across software and hardware platforms.

An exhibition by Mahdiyar Jamshidi reflecting on childhood, memory, and disappearance in the long aftermath of the Iran Iraq War, where personal recollection becomes a method for decoding collective trauma.

An exhibition by Mahtab Mozayan presenting painting, drawing, and video works that unfold as an intimate monologue, where fear, fantasy, violence, humor, and care intertwine through a fragmented, confessional voice.

An official screening of Root Canal, Samira Eskandarfar’s black-and-white feature film that brings three women into intimate dialogue to examine love, femininity, the body, loss, and mortality, unfolding in an abstract, shifting space where personal experience, social expectation, and inner contradiction collide.