Sazmanab ⧚ Water Dept.
Sazmanab ⧚ Water Dept. (2019–2020) was a duplicated iteration of Sazmanab, developed by Sohrab Kashani and Jon Rubin through The Other Apartment project and realised simultaneously in Tehran and Pittsburgh. Conceived as a parallel institutional body, it recreated Sazmanab inside the Museum of Sohrab in Tehran and inside The Other Apartment at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, producing two spatially distant yet conceptually connected versions of the same platform.
This iteration extended Sazmanab’s long-standing interest in institutional hacking, duplication, and informal infrastructures. By operating as a doubled site, Sazmanab ⧚ Water Dept. examined how an art space could exist across borders while retaining its organisational logic, archive, and modes of gathering. Programming unfolded across both locations, collapsing distinctions between original and copy, centre and periphery, presence and transmission.
As with earlier phases of Sazmanab, this edition functioned without a fixed institutional hierarchy, prioritising encounter, shared authorship, and the redistribution of resources and attention. The name “Water Department” referenced Sazmanab’s original location opposite Tehran’s municipal water distribution centre and continued its metaphor of art as a vital, distributable resource.
