Introduction

Excerpt:

There is no such thing as a perfect substitute in translation. There are instead, displacements and interpretations, which remain nevertheless within the limits of the text. But beyond this, translations can, in their more radical instance, release a surplus. This surplus of translation is neither solely of the original nor of the context of its destination, and not even of their differences. It is brought about by the excess in translation itself – through over-interpretation – in order to supplement what is left out from the text(s). The surplus has a life of its own beyond the binarism of translation. It is a bypass, a detour, for saying the things that cannot be said otherwise. The surplus is the braking of translation into excerpts, extending it to unsought relations. These passages diverging from translation may come to occasion the voicing of things other than that which the initial translation sought to speak of; they may come to engender desires, contradictions and struggles that make up the social to re-enter language.
...

Contents

Editorial 
Pages

Translation as the Experience of Homelessness 
Saleh Najafi

One Question and Four Replies 
Hamed Yousefi

Contact Zones
Marion von Osten & Andreas Müller

One Question and Four Replies
Ali Solhjou

Violent Distortions: The Return of the Translator-Interpreter
Zrinka Stahuljak

Untitled
Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi

Excess of Translation in Iranian Situation
Omid Mehrgan

One Question and Four Replies
Media Kashigar

Notes about Spamsoc 
Hito Steyerl

One Question and Four Replies
Fatemeh Valiani

Politics of Opening: Translation as Authorship
Bavand Behpoor

Introduction

During our research for this issue we came across an ambiguous clipping from the art section of an Iranian newspaper from 1977. The headline reads: “Artistic Fantasy! / Shah-Reza Avenue is Art...! / On the conditions of an exhibition with a tour through it.” The text, supposedly an exhibition review, is an imaginary account of a walk up and down Shah-Reza Avenue with various art and artistically associated encounters. Next to the text is the poster of the exhibition announcing Koorosh Shishegaran’s* [art] works [as] the Shah-Reza Avenue. itself. In smaller fonts the Avenue is assigned with all artistic media from painting to theatre, to architecture and music etc. In this way the exhibition constituted the everyday life and affairs of Shah-Reza Avenue, all claimed by the artist as his readymade artwork; a purely conceptual piece consisting of a single poster hung along the length of Shah-Reza Avenue for a certain period.

What is striking about this newspaper clipping is the editorial note preceding the review, a sardonicism quite difficult to pinpoint:

While our writers from the art section were trying to make sense of the poster ‘Kourosh Shishegaran’s works: Shah-Reza Avenue itself’, we received a letter from Shishegaran that coincided with the imaginary writing that one of our colleagues had prepared about this “exhibition”. We print here both the letter and the writing – which is quite befitting in the upcoming New Year’s holidays.

What exactly do the editors mean by “…befitting in the upcoming New Year’s holidays”? Is it because during holidays readers will have more time to visit the exhibition – when most people have left the city and the activities on Avenues like Shah-Reza are at their minimum? In this case these holidays are not the best time for visiting the exhibition. Or is it that the holidays are in fact the best times to (re-) interpret – imaginarily – Shah-Reza Avenue? Shishegaran’s letter to the editors of the newspaper clearly indicates that the work (the poster) was suffering a general misunderstanding; some had gone down Shah-Reza Avenue actually looking for his exhibited work. Shishegaran’s request from the editors is to clarify the issue. However, they decide to print his letter next to the imaginary review of Shah-Reza Avenue. But the review itself is the peak of this misunderstanding. The narrator’s voice, presumably reporting on his visit to the exhibition has an ironic tone to it, accompanied with a cynicism that writes off Shishegaran’s work as absurd and misplaced.

[…]

This issue of Pages is in general about space and practice, spaces of events and productions, of disclosures and enclosures. Some of the questions that went through our minds, which may remain unanswered but undoubtedly are unfolded in this issue of Pages were:

What is an art space when art and its practice – in circumstances like those of Iran – is continuously overwhelmed by discontinuity, spatial closure and by its own historical rift? Can an art space constitute interludes of presence and practice? Are these interludes, discontinuous as they may be, capable of introducing a rift into the spatial closure? When does a space become a discursive space? To what extent did – and does – modernity provide the paradigm for the production of space for art?

In looking into the issues raised in these questions we could not escape the echoing of the historical dilemmas that have haunted cultural production in Iran, and continue to affect contemporary practitioners. What follows are on the one hand re-prints of past magazines and newspaper clippings that reflect conflicts of architecture design, predicaments of the social engagement of art, ideological convictions and displacements in art, and the discontinuities in modernist paradigms and their practices. These reprints coincide with a series of dialogues that we have conducted with practitioners in art and culture, architecture and urban planning. What these dialogues have in common is the contemporaneity of their discussions with a historical postponement of a certain modernity. Yet the practices and experiences that are talked about in these dialogues are all affected with the possibility of an eventual gain.

As with past issues, this is a continuation of Pages’ previous concerns and an unfolding of an ongoing discussion that will be further developed in upcoming editions and projects.

 

Contents

Editorial
Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi

The city and social presentation of art:A glance at Ghandriz Gallery experience
Reprint: Goftogou, Quarterly

The capacity and the Expanse 2
Reprint: Roodaki magazine

The Wall Project
Kaveh Rashidzade

Urban Spaces of Event
Conversation between Morvarid Ghassemi and Pages

Art + Art 
Koorosh Shishegaran

The Issue:Iranian vs.Western Design
Reprint: Art & Architecture magazine

Interior Decoration 
Reprint: Architect magazine

Apadana gallery and the course of a newspaper
Reprints from differnt newspapers in 1949، Compiled by Pages

The Unitary message of the artists. A Short excursion at the Exhibitions Held on the Occasion of Dahe-ye Fajr
Reprint: Art Quarterly

Pathology of art space [an Iranian case] 
A converstation between Barbad Gholshiri, Hamed Yousefi, Shahab Fotouhi and Pages

      

Introduction

Editorial 1
To be on the verge of something is to be at a place where something is about to begin and something else is about to end. When we experience the whirling sensation of vertigo we lose our balance. On the verge of vertigo, we nearly lose our equilibrium. The temptation of whirling brings us close to this loss, and yet it doesn’t bring us quite there. On the verge of vertigo, you sense stability and imbalance at the same time, and yet you have neither of them. What if this becomes the way we live our lives, an ambivalence in which culture is practiced and identity produced?


Editorial 2
Is it possible to talk of instances of disassociation, or even a kind of misidentification in regard to cultural identity? If we take cultural identity to be in the realm of the collective, both in the social and historical sphere, and on the level of the individual, as a process of subject formation - conflicts between the two may occur in a particular place. This condition provides the context for instances of cultural disassociation and misidentification by which pervading definition of cultural identity is put into question. Often it is in the wake of such conflictual instances that most misplaced representations of identity are produced.

The desire for stability in cultural identity is sustained on the basis of renunciation and repudiation – if not condemnation – of the (imbalanced) ‘other’ of this identity. Of course that which constitutes this desire, namely the repudiated ‘other’, has to be repeatedly invented if the desire is to be sustained.

It is at times of crisis that identity becomes an issue and is politicized. Heightened and exaggerated identifications are devised in opposition to the re-emerging of what was initially repudiated. And what re-emerges is even more hyperbolic in its identity and cultural representation. The final scene is of overwhelming contradictions, and at times violent collisions.

Editorial 3
The sensation of being on the verge of vertigo is that of the ambivalence of being in a world and dissociated from it. And yet this ambivalence engenders practices of subjectivization outside available (or at times enforced) cultural identifications.

Contents

Editorial 1,2,3
Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi

Cultural Ruptures and Promises of Architectural Education in Iran
Kianoosh Vahabi

Drawings
Dan Perjovschi

Almostreal…
Igor Dobricic, Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen, Wietske Maas

The Baron’ s Palace
Sven Augustijnen

Traffic and the Ghost of Law
Omid Mehregan

Self- Colonisation (Dan Perjovschi and His Critique of the Post- Communist Restructuring of Identity)
Marius Babias

Other Publications
Mohammadreza Haeri,Majeed Eslami, Saed Meshky

“ I was Happy When I was a Virgin” (Küba as a mode of de- regulated Experience) 
Irit Rogoff

External Conversations 
Alireza Rasoulinezhad & Shadmehr Rastin

Laceration of the Symbolic Skin 
Omid Mehregan

Cultural Identity or National Modernism? 

      

Introduction

Pages 4 addresses voice in some of its circumstances: in public spaces when it takes on an artificial sounding, leading you through the city – or in far away phone centres, where it is manufactured into other identities than that of its owner – or reproduced into the voice of a different self as in cyberspace – or in cinematic dubbing when it becomes an act of duplicity – or as in rumours when it moves from mouth to mouth, compensating the lacking flow of information…

Contents

Emergence of the Iranian cyberspace and the production of the “Self” in Weblogestan
Masserat Amir Ebrahimi

Guided by Voices
Paul Elliman

The Labour of the Larynx: Leveraging Performance Across Space 
Raqs Media Collective

Dubbing, Doubling, and Duplicity 
Hamid Naficy

From Mouth to Mouth
Annabelle Sreberny

Unwanted urban conversation
Babak Rostamian and Ashkan Sedigh

      

Introduction

In July 2004 we began the search in Tehran for
a location in order to set up an independent international art space. It appears to us that inevitably some important characteristics of any potential location need to be carefully considered. As in any other city, various locations in Tehran carry out not only specific urban functions, they also possess a socio-political significance. Producing an independent art space would in one way or another force us to internalize issues relating to these paradigms from the very start. It would be futile to try to disavow the socio-political and urban significances of these locations however
independent we like the space to be. Clearly the
notion of a desirable art space remains relative.

This first step in the project “In search of a location for an international / independent art space in Tehran” is focusing on the various attributes and significations of locations that may or may not offer possibilities for the setting up of an art space. By launching the idea of an art space through various urban, political and social traits of each of its possible locations, a series of spatial positions are introduced that already provide a space or the means for generating art projects.

The first production out of this search is a “décorobject”, which is an extract from the first location. The original object, being a wooden built-in shelving unit with an extension frame forming a passage from the hallway to the living room, has a significant role within the interior mise-en-scène of this location.* Separating this object from its original mise-en-scène, by way of reproducing it as an autonomous object, is an attempt in diverting, however partially, the desire for an art space towards production.

The “décor-object”, an approximate reproduction of the original shelving unit, has a height of 290 centimetres, is 78 centimetres wide, and with its extension frame carries a length of 350 centimetres. It includes four shelves each being 58 by 20 centimetre with a distance of 50 centimetres in between. The material used for this reproduction is 3-centimetre thick plywood. The object is later
coated with chestnut brown finish.

The reproduced “décor-object” is a condensation
of the idea of location and display at once, a trade mark for a possible independent art space.
The project “In search of a location for an international / independent art Space in Tehran” will continue to develop further and will be an on going part of the activities of pages.


* Built in the early 70’s together with the house, it is a reduced version of a once popular design that originally functioned both as spatial division and decoration. This pseudomodernist architectural element, famous as the “decor” was first introduced in the early 50’s and is still to be found in houses from that era.

Contents

In Search of a Location for an International/Independent Art Space in Tehran
Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi

Stecca Degli Artigiani
Gruppo A12

Location 1 ( In Search of a Location for an International/ Independent Art Space in Tehran )
Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi

Proposition for reclaiming a space 
Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol

Pakistan Street
Arash Mozafari

      

Introduction

What makes a place different is first of all it’s setting
or its mise-en-scène ,that is, the orientations it implies and the subjectivities it entails. Often however, a place thought of in these terms, is translated into a location from where stories are transmitted, or transposed into a localewith a recating of its inhabitants’ roles into re-enactments of the play of the space they inhabit. Transpositions ca develope into strategies of applying changes to places. These changes do not necessarily have to be physical to be real.

The idea of moving Iran’s capital has been under discussion since 1989, due to Tehran’s heavy pollution and overcrowding, but most of all due to the risk of an earthquake. Tehran lies on a major seismological fault and experts
have long warned that a strong earthquake in the city would be devastating. Numerous faults crisscross the city. The hazard of the city is
known, but to predict the time of the earthquake remains, as always, impossible. It is believed that it takes 20 to 30 years to gradually move the
population out of the capital.

The withdrawal of the governing force from Tehran as the first (and possibly the last) steps in moving the capital would not only undermine the city’s geopolitical role on the national and international level, but even the social, economicaland urban structure of the city will be destabilized. But more than anything this idea of moving the capital carries with itself, as a safety measure, the notion of abandonment, an escape from the predicted disaster that may one day take us for surprise.

The citizens of Tehran are faced with a double-edged anticipation: the predicted catastrophe and its proposed preventive measure, the moving of the capital. They both lack any political, economical and scientific backing for the time and nature of their occurrence. This has developed the abstract notion of predictions (that of the quake), and the fantasy of prevention (in terms of the moving of the capital) into an ever-returning dialectics that is evoked whenever reality comes too close.

The anticipation of the moving of the city of Tehran is maybe closer to reality than the catastrophe that is being predicted for more than 20 years. But this is nothing new. Any preventive measure for a predicted catastrophe is meant to take place way before it is too late. The occupation of Iraq by the allies was also a preventive measure to “safeguard the world” from a predicted nuclear catastrophe. What happened was in the end the opposite: the prevention became the actual catastrophe; the anxiety of a catastrophe is often taken as a pretext for the safeguarding and the reestablishment of positions and ideologies.

Contents

Diagram & Rhizome
Gelayol Mosaeb & Mohammad Hassan Malekpour

Foreword
Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi

A city built by its inhabitants 
Arash Mozafari

Looking for a Missing Employee 
Rabih Mroue

Review: Looking for a Missing Employee 
Pierre Abi Saab

Nothing will ever happen here, Nothing has ever Happened
Arta Group in collaboration with Pages Magazine

The Strait or a Life Full of Holes
Yto Barrada

The case of two American Embassies
Vesta Nele Zareh

Interview with Steve McQueen 
Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi

An Eclipse, which dropped from the sky
Maani Petgar

      

Introduction

News and the press in Iran are an important part of everyday life, a part of the private and public life of every citizen. There are more than 50 newspapers and other publications distributed every day in the streets of major cities. One may no longer see the same titles one would have found a few years ago on the shelves of the newsstands, but new titles always appear to fill in the gaps on the shelf. (What is interesting is that the press itself has become an important part of the news…) The large quantity of dailies, weeklies or periodicals says a lot about the intensified tendency to address social and political issues. This clearly reflects a gradual social move away from predefined codes and representations, toward the acceptance of a profound cultural difference and a diversified subjectivity. As a public domain where news, opinions and dialogues are circulated, the press has led a turbulent and a fragmentary life. Because of the juridical and political confusion the press is facing, the circulation of these dialogues and opinions remain rather short-lived and often inconsistent. And this has intensified the social and political agitation in Iran, where discordant and transitory discourses of representations have come to coexist.

On the other hand, the overall sociopolitical climate in Iran undermines any attempt to construct or implement consistent or even stereotypical cultural representations, either from inside or outside. However, attempts are still being made to suggest a homogeneous state of affairs, either by the traditionalists in Iran or by certain cultural agents in the West, in order to promote simplified representations that address “cultural localities” and “difference” in a “global world.” These misreadings, especially by onlookers from the West, tend to reduce those narratives of difference and discord (which profoundly define the cultural condition) to irrelevancy. In both cases we are dealing with a process of projective subjectivization, by means of which the -traditionalist and/or the Western- onlooker (presup)poses the existence of a symbolic network with which he can identify, though it may or may not be relevant to reality. In other words he designates a determinate subject position for himself through the projection of narratives other than those of the real, which always involve differentiation and dissonance.

Pages is an attempt to communicate these existing narratives. Rooted more in the context of visual arts, this periodical tries to function as a platform for exchanging thoughts and artistic projects reflecting on the sociopolitical currents in Iran and elsewhere. For its first issue, Pages will address the subject of public and private in Iran, in terms of space, appearance and activity. Through the contributions of different authors, it aims to approach different representations of public and private in cinema, photography, theater and architecture.
It is hoped that the publication of this periodical will be continuous and that in its later issues it will include contributions of non-Iranian writers and artists, so as to widen its territories of exchange and dialogue.

Contents

Foreword
Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi

Bus [photography]
Farzaneh Khademian

Public space in Enclosure 
Masserat Amir Ebrahimi

Arta group
Ayat Najafi، Akram Mahmoudian

Resort to privacy 
Kianoosh Vahabi

In search of Ideal public space
Atoosa Afshin Navid

Split narrative of privacy 
Babak Afrassiabi

Family (photography)
Saeideh Akbari

Deleted Scenes
Kiarash Anvari

Report from the border with Iraq 
Bahman Kiarostami