Exhibition and Performance of “The Homeling” by Aphrodite Désirée navab – Thurs, 4/5/12

Aphrodite Désirée Navab is an artist based in New York City of Iranian and Greek descent. Her performance art series: Super East-West Woman (ongoing since 2002) is motivated by a strategy of using humor and her own body for political and cultural critique. The concept was born in 2002 after former President George W. Bush branded Iran as one of the three nations comprising an “axis of evil.” It

reminded her of the Islamic revolution in 1978-79 when Iran’s new leaders labeled the United States as the country of the “Great Satan.” Growing up in the USA, Navab was destined to critique the nations and cultures that inhabit her identity and who are so bent on vilifying each other.
Navab took her chador and turned it into a cape. The Superman figure of popular Western culture is transformed into a Superwoman whose chador turns into a cape of agency. She pokes fun at herself, her cultures, and the ludicrous situations in which her life, between East and West, has placed her. Cultural displacement has not left her incapacitated; rather, it has given her the capacity to live out her healing vision. Armored with her Persian amulets and Greek anti-evil eye bracelets, Super East-West Woman hopes to chase away the evil for which each nation blames the other.

Her commissioned performance for Shahrzad gallery at 8 pm on April 5th, 2012 at Theaterlab: 137 W 14th St, NYC is a continuation of her Super East-West Woman series: “The Homeling.” Homeling was her Greek grandmother Efigenia’s pronunciation for homeless. Neither homeless nor at home, homeling captures both the horror and the rapture, in re-locating home and world.

Navab invites us to imagine a ‘third space’ of working, contesting and reconstructing, allowing other positions to emerge–a space of transnational and cross-cultural initiations.

Event info can be found here.

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Artist Talk: A Conversation with Parviz Tanavoli

Monday, February 27th, 6:30pm – 8:00pmAsia Society | 725 Park Ave | NYC

Parviz Tanavoli, one of Iran’s foremost artists, will be speaking with Melissa Chiu about his journey as Iran’s first significant modern sculptor. A central figure in the formation of the Saqqakhaneh School — a neo-traditional style of art that derives inspiration from Iranian folk art and culture — Tanavoli has created works in bronze, ceramic, fiberglass and scrap metal.Tanavoli will discuss his early years as an artist, later as head of the sculpture department at Tehran University and his passion about Iran’s artistic heritage and craftsmanship, including rugs, locks and metalwork.Click here to buy tickets.

Norooz Celebration! Mar. 22 | 7pm | Brooklyn, NY

Bowery Arts + Science and City Lore in collaboration with
Persian Arts Festival Present:

Norooz Celebration
Thurs, March 22nd
7 – 11 pm

VII Gallery | 28 Jay Street | DUMBO Brooklyn

Bowery Arts + Science, City Lore and the PAF ring in the Persian New Year in DUMBO, with contemporary literary and musical performances that will delight all ages and backgrounds. Come together and celebrate the wealth and beauty of Persian art and culture!

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Featuring:

• Multi-media performances by poets on the subjects of life, death, homeland and love. Poets include Roger SedaratSara GoudarziAmir Parsa and Kaveh Bassiri. Poems will be projected in Persian morphing into English translations from the roof of the POEMobile, a hand-painted truck and traveling cinema of words, onto DUMBO’s buildings and streets surrounding VII Gallery!

• Film viewing of Niloufar Talebi’s The Persian Rite of Spring: the story of Nowruz
Clips  available for viewing here.

• Musical performance by Middle East-meets-Brooklyn band, Vatan.

 Performance Art – Iranian Greek American conceptual artist, Aphrodite Desiree Navab will perform “The Metamorph.” Materials: artist’s body, chador, mat, Scarlatti sonata in F minor K 466, haftsin.

Bowery Arts + Science, Ltd. is grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for its New York City Cultural Innovation Fund award.

Sponsors:

PAF thanks this year’s music performance sponsor: Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA)

Other promotional sponsors include New York University Persian Club, Persian Mirror, Columbia Iranian Students Association, Shabeh Jomeh, Network of Iranian Professionals of New York (NIPONY), Association of Iranian American Writers (AIAW), Oznoz Entertainment.

About Persian Arts Festival:

Founded in 2005, the Persian Arts Festival (PAF) is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to showcasing the magnificence and diversity of Persian art and culture through its voices, artists and visionaries. PAF brings local and global communities together to support these artists and explore one of the world’s most ancient and rich civilizations. The festival gives audiences of all ages and traditions the chance to discover new Persian voices and celebrate established ones. Areas represented at previous events have included fine art, music, film, comedy, family activities and literary.

The Persian Arts Festival is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). NYFA is a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt organization founded in 1971 to work with the arts community throughout New York State to develop and facilitate programs in all disciplines.

About the POEMobile:

This performance is one in a series of poetry events composing A White Wing Brushing the Building, a Bowery Arts + Science and City Lore project highlighting the poetry of New York City’s ethnic communities and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Grant. The project will focus on the poetry of 8 cultural communities in New York in 2011 and 8 in 2012, with the majority of the events happening during the summer. The titular “white wing” is taken from a poem by Martín Espada and refers to the projections of the poems that are integral part of the project as well as the live poetry readings which will happen in each of the communities.

To date, White Wing has hosted projections and poetry performances in the languages of the Lower East Side (Yiddish, Ukrainian, Spanish, and Cantonese) at the New Museum’s Festival of New Ideas and new work by Native American poets at the American Indian Community House and by Greek at Federation of Hellenic Societies in Astoria. Additional 2011collaborating communities included Mexican, Haitian, and Nuyorican; the POEMobile also appeared at the 2011 Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival. The events are stand alone programs but unified by the common elements of the poetry projections, which will reach the city’s neighborhoods—its storefronts, its basketball courts, its warehouse walls—from the POEMobile.

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Support the production of THE IRAN JOB, a new Persian film

THE IRAN JOB follows American basketball player Kevin Sheppard as he accepts a job to play in one of the world’s most feared countries: Iran. With tensions running high between Iran and the West, Kevin tries to separate sports from politics, only to find that politics is impossible to escape in Iran. Along the way he forms an unlikely alliance with three outspoken Iranian women. Thanks to these women, his apartment turns into an oasis of free speech, where they discuss everything from politics to religion to gender roles. Kevin’s season in Iran culminates in something much bigger than basketball: the uprising and subsequent suppression of Iran’s reformist Green Movement – a powerful prelude to the currently unfolding Arab Spring.

Read more about the film and back it through its Kickstarter Campaign here.

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The Film Society of LINCOLN CENTER presents the 49th edition of the NCY’s most prestigious films festival…

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL (49TH ANNUAL NYFF)

Setpember 30 – October 16

at Alice Tully Hall, the Walter Reade Theatre, and Elinor Bunim Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center

for a full list of films and ticket information, go to http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2011

The 17-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring top films from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent.  Now in its 49th year, the festival’s main slate includes 27 films that will screen in the incomparable Alice Tully Hall from September 30 – October 16. THIS YEAR’S FESTIVAL INCLUDES TWO IRANIAN FILMS we think you might be particularly excited about!

• A SEPARATION by Asghar Farhadi

Saturday, Oct 1: 6:00 pm | Sunday, Oct 2: 1:00 pm

A critical and audience favorite at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Golden Bear as well as acting prizes for all four lead performers, A Separation is an Iranian Rashomon of searing family drama that turns into an unexpectedly gripping legal thriller. The film, directed by Asghar Farhadi, begins with married couple Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moadi) obtaining coveted visas to leave Iran for the United States, where Simin hopes to offer a better future to their 11-year-old daughter. But Nader doesn’t feel comfortable abandoning his elderly, Alzheimer’s-stricken father, and so the couple embark on a trial separation. To help care for the old man, Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a pregnant, deeply religious woman who takes the job unbeknownst to her husband (Shahab Hosseini), an out-of-work cobbler. Almost immediately there are complications, culminating in a sudden burst of violence that constantly challenges our own perceptions of who (if anyone) is to blame and what really happened. A Sony Pictures Classics release. More info: http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/a-separation

COUNTRY: IRAN | PERSIAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES | RUNNING TIME: 123M

• THIS IS NOT A FILM by Jafar Panahi, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb

Thursday, Oct 13: 6:00 pm

Accused of collusion against the Iranian regime and currently appealing a prison sentence and a ban from filmmaking, Jafar Panahi (a four-time NYFF veteran with films like Offside and Crimson Gold) collaborated with the documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb on a remarkable day-in-the-life chronicle that, as with many great Iranian films, finds a rich middle ground between fiction and reality. Shot with a digital camera and an iPhone, the movie is almost entirely confined to the director’s apartment, where he discusses his films and an unrealized script, while the outside world imposes itself through phone calls, television news, a few comic interruptions, and the sound of New Year’s fireworks. Far more than the modest home movie it initially seems to be, This Is Not a Film is an act of courage and a statement of political and moral conviction: surprising, radical, and enormously moving. More info: http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/this-is-not-a-film

In addition, the 49th New York Film Festival will include more special screenings and events than ever before.  From debuts to forums to industry dialogues, the Film Society of Lincoln Center can’t wait to bring you a truly 360-degree view of the film world today.  Stay tuned for even more additions to this exciting list of programs!

http://www.filmlinc.com/films/series/nyff-special-events

Film Society of Lincoln Center

165 West 65th Street

between Broadway and Amsterdam

the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater is on 65th Street near Amsterdam Avenue.

Buy Ticketes ONLINE here: http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2011/pages/ticket-info/

VISIT OUR BOX OFFICES

Walter Reade Theater

165 West 65th Street, north side/upper level

Monday-Friday opens at 12:30pm, Saturday/Sunday opens one half hour before the first screening. Closes every day 15 minutes after the start of the last show. If there are no evening screenings, the box office closes at 6pm. For more information call 212 875 5601 during hours of operation.

Sima Bina & Lian Ensemble (Sat) Jun 4, 2011 at 8:00 PM

Sima Bina & Lian Ensemble (Sat) Jun 4, 2011 at 8:00 PM

Sima Bina, one of Iran’s most distinguished folk and classical singers, makes a rare appearance in New York with the highly acclaimed Lian Ensemble.  Together they will present a stunning blend of music influenced by Persian traditional and folk music.  Evocative and exhilarating, the music presented is an authentic expression of a way of life and a rejection of rigid boundaries, preferring simplicity, authenticity, joy and hope. For one night at The Town Hall, hear Sima Bina and Lian Ensemble bring to life the wonder of Persian folk and classical music.

Ticket Prices:  $100, 85, 75 & 55
How to Get Tickets: Ticketmaster
http://www.ticketmaster.com/event/0300463BF301A3B7?artistid=784513&majorcatid=10001&minorcatid=2

Producer: Absolutely Live

The Town Hall is located at
123 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036

http://townhall.lw1.mageenet.net/events/6/June#173

212.840.2824

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5th Annual Persian Arts Festival — MARCH 26 — TICKETS ON SALE NOW

5th Annual Persian Arts Festival
Saturday, March 26, 2011
6pm doors; 7pm show

92YTribeca 200 Hudson Street, New York City
Tickets on sale now http://www.92y.org/shop/92Tri_series_detail.asp?productid=T-MM5PM99

EARLY SHOW:

“OUR SWEET LIFE BY THE PACIFIC OCEAN” STAGE READING STARRING SHOHREH AGHDASHLOO AND HOUSHANG TOUZIE
*WORLD PREMIER*

http://www.92y.org/shop/92Tri_event_detail.asp?productid=T-MM5PM10

From the acclaimed writer, producer and actor, Houshang Touzie, comes the hilarious story about an Iranian man struggling to provide for his family, revive the passion in his marriage and communicate with a rebellious son raised far from what once was “home.” Join us at 92YTribeca for this concert-style reading, starring the Emmy award-winning actress Shohreh Aghdashloo and Touzie himself.

Directed by Shidan Majidi and produced by Noor Theatre and Persian Arts Festival, this is an event not to be missed.

LATE SHOW:

RICHARD JEFFREY NEWMAN / AMIR VAHAB / LIKE A PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES / DJ PAYAM

http://www.92y.org/shop/92Tri_event_detail.asp?productid=T-MM5PM11

A celebration of Persian arts and culture featuring literature, music and film.

Starting off the late show portion of the night, Richard Jeffrey Newman http://www.richardjnewman.com reads from The Teller of Tales (Junction Press), his newly published translation of the first five kings’ stories in Ferdowsi’s Shahnahmeh.

Hailed by The New York Times as the “ambassador for a silenced music,” Amir Vahab is one of New York’s most celebrated and distinguished composer / vocalists of traditional sufi and folk music and will perform a spectacular set of music featuring songs of the Ancient land of the Middle East.

Rounding out the night will be a screening of “Like A Phoenix From The Ashes” — a psychedelic visual feast of ultra-rare and vintage film from ’60s/’70s Iran, culled and curated from hundreds of hours and endless stacks of VHS and film of flicks from the pre-revolution glory years. Curated by Mahssa Taghinia and Tom Fitzgerald, edited and “collaged” by Tom Fitzgerald, and soundtracked with an exclusive Persian mash-up mix done by Finders Keepers founder Andy Votel. The music paired with this rare film footage can be found on the critically acclaimed release “Pomegranates” featuring Persian folk and funk that will have everyone on their feet.

Musical ambiance will also be provided by DJ Payam throughout the evening, spinning rare grooves from around the globe.

Art Installation: A PAF original Haftseen, showcasing a collection of artwork creating a one-of-a-kind public display. The Haftseen, or the seven ‘S’s is a traditional celebratory table setting of Norooz, the Persian New Year. The items symbolically correspond to seven creations and sacred immortals protecting them. Curated by PAF Art Director, Pooneh Maghazehe.

FESTIVAL SPONSORS
AIIrS American Institute of Iranian Studies

PROMOTIONAL PARTNERS
New York University Persian Club
IAAB Iranian Alliances Across Borders
PAAIA Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans
CISA Columbia Iranian Students Association

FOLKS TO THANK FOR THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS
Noor Theater, 92Y Tribeca & all their staff,more to come,,,adding more everyday!

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Here She Is To Save The Day! Artist Aphrodite Désirée Navab’s Photographic Narrative

In a new installation of photographs at New York City’s Skylight Gallery, Iranian-American artist Aphrodite Désirée Navab deals with geo-political issues between the Middle East and the United States through a cheeky visual hybrid of idealized American superhero motifs and traditional women’s garments from the Middle East.

In her new photography exhibition Super East-West Woman’s Sufi Dance: Egypt, which opens February 28th, 2011,Navab documented herself whirling through Egypt’s capital city of Cairo – armed with her superhero shirt and her chador (Islamic covering for women) which pulls double duty as her hero-cape.

“The Superman figure of popular Western culture is transformed into a Superwoman whose chador turns into a cape of agency” Navab said. The cheek of Navab’s art has allowed her to represent visually the ludicrous situations in which her cultural duality has placed her.

The exhibition was inspired by the mounting tensions between the U.S. and the Middle East – in particular Iran. Navab describes her motivation behind the piece “take[ing] shape in 2002 after President George W. Bush branded Iran as one of the three nations comprising an “axis of evil.” This reminded Navab of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when Iran’s new leaders labeled the United States as “The Great Satan.”

Growing up in the USA, Navab was destined to critique the two nations and cultures that define her identity.The end result is a provocative, nostalgic, and pensive body of work which blends traditional Islamic elements with American popular culture. And, perhaps Super East-West Woman illustrates what Navab herself lives every day of her life: that these two cultures can most definitely live side by side in harmony, even beauty.

The exhibition will run from February 28-April 3, 2011, at the Skylight Gallery NYC. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday from 10am until 4pm. The gallery is located at 538 W 29th St. NY, NY 10001. For more information or inquiries, please contact Gallery Director Carla Goldberg at 646-772-2407, or via email at [email protected].

Upcoming exhibitions of Aphrodite Navab include works featured at the Affordable Art Fair May 5-8, 2011 at 7W 34th St., NYC, as well as a solo exhibition opening September 6 running through October 1, 2011 at Soho 20 Chelsea, 547 W27th St., Suite 301, NYC.

Iranian Theater Festival – 3/3 – 3/26, Brooklyn, NY

Iran is one of the oldest civilizations in history. Persian theater, influenced by Arab, Assyrian, and other cultures of the Middle East, has created many rich traditions of performance from ancient times through the modern day. Yet this vibrant heritage remains woefully underrepresented on American stages.

The Brick proposes to expand the boundaries of this cultural moment, and collaborate with Iranian theater artists in the US and abroad, by hosting and producing the first festival in New York devoted solely to Iranian Theater.

The festival will include plays in Persian and English, such as Something Something Über Alles written by Iranian exile and Hellman/Hammett Grant–winner Assurbanipal Babilla, Two Stories That End in Suicide by Piehole (inspired by Sadegh Hedayet’sThe Blind Owl), a preview excerpt from Brendan Regimbal and Samara Naeymi’sAviary, Leila Ghaznavi’s Silken Veils, newly-commissioned contemporary works from Iranian-based playwrights and participants of the Fadjr International Theatre Festival, and a special celebration of the traditional Iranian New Year’s holiday, Nowruz.

A special celebration of the late theater legend Reza Abdoh will include exclusive screenings of complete films of his original productions The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice and Quotations from a Ruined City with special panel discussions by Dar a Luz company members, including Sabrina Artel, Juliana Francis-Kelly, and Tony Torn.

Tickets: $15 (unless otherwise indicated)