The Life of an Itinerant Through a Pinhole
2015 – work in progress
Photography archive
Size variable
In collaboration with Konstfack University College of Art and Design
Behzad Khosravi-Noori (1976) is an artist and writer based in Stockholm and Tehran. He graduated from Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran with a Master’s in Motion Picture Studies and received a Master’s in Art in the Public Realm at Konstfack University College of Art and Design in Stockholm. Khosravi-Noori uses personal experience as a springboard to establish, through artistic research, a hypothetical relationship between personal memories and significant world events, between micro and macro histories. His works focus on films and historical materials in order to raise questions such as ‘What happens to narratives when they cross the border?’ and ‘What is the future of our collective past?’. Khosravi-Noori’s research-based practice includes films and installations as well as archival studies.
By conducting a historical analysis of archival images from a working-class immigrant community – taken by a local itinerant photographer, Gholamreza Amirbegi – this art project attempts to present the relationship between class identity and means of production in Tehran in the period roughly between 1956 and 1968. On one hand, the archive presents the identity of a social group in the context of the history of the city of Tehran after the Second World War, revealing the effects of the war and the subsequent economic devastation and bankruptcy of smaller cities, but on the other hand it also underlines the entanglements between the global and the local in relation to the effects of grand political events and of foreign film productions, especially Bollywood and Yugoslav partisan films, on an isolated working-class neighbourhood in the south-west of Tehran. By re-narrating the archival materials, signifying subaltern histories of the global south, the project tries to dig into social changes in contemporary history from below, uncovering the unconscious colonial memories that relate to the technological history of image production.