group etc. is a fictive collective that creates realities; a platform for storytellers to tell a story; an archive of ideas and stories available to its members’ individual (non-)artistic practice; an experiment within language boundaries; practiced in different forms from online writing sessions to public events and publications; accepting members from art world and elsewhere.
group etc. had a writing session with members of rum46, Århus in December 2009.
Shirin Sabahi’s exhibition in rum46 evolves from 8-mm films taken by Jan Edman in Iran and Sweden during the ’60s and the ’70s. Edman is a retired Swedish engineer who traveled to Iran nearly 15 times between 1966 and 1979 on behalf of a Malmö–based company Agriconsult for the purpose of realizing industrial projects for various Iranian state-owned and private industries.
Among the projects Edman was working on in Iran, Sabahi follows the former Tehran slaughterhouse from its formation in a suburban area to its industrialization and further transformation to a culture house in the process of gentrification of the area. This slaughter/culture house is carefully set as the meeting point of multiple narrations that Sabahi provides the audience with in the installation Swede Home 1966/1973/1975/2009. These narrations are based on the diverse contributions of workers of Agriconsult and Tehran slaughterhouse in the research that the artist conducted around this non-lived past that she carries variety of its memories through different modes of transference. Approaching the found footage as both an insider and an outsider, her work deals with notions of belonging and displacement, identity, social memory and colonial modernity.
Shirin Sabahi (b. Tehran) received her BA in photography from Tehran Art University in 2007 and her MFA from Malmö Art Academy in 2009. She is currently an artist-in-residence in rum46.
Shirin Sabahi:
Les Misérables on Stage at Bahman Culture House (Tehran Slaughterhouse)
