Neda Razavipour | "Daily Notes 2007-2010": Dastan's Basement

Dastan is pleased to announce Neda Razavipour’s solo exhibition and book launch titled “Daily Notes 2007-2010” at Dastan’s Basement. The exhibition will be open for public viewing from September 28 through October 19, 2018.
Neda Razavipour (b. 1969, Tehran) is an interdisciplinary and intermedia artist. She is a graduate of Fine Arts from the University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and Stage/Space Design from ENSAD, Paris. Her work was first shown in “The First Exhibition of Conceptual Art” (2001) at Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, and has been widely exhibited in eight solo exhibitions and tens of group shows internationally. She works in a wide variety of media including installation, drawing, photography, video and performance.
Reviewing how work on the current series of works began, she writes: “Just when some artist friends and I settled in a shared studio we had long been looking for, tragedies of one kind or another followed. One worse than the other. The ground beneath our feet had suddenly collapsed. It had, of course, happened before, but it never ceased to be an appalling surprise.” During that time, she would chose images from newspapers and draw them in the corresponding dates of yearbooks —something which became like a tradition with the artist continuing to work on them to review daily events and focus on drawing.
This continued while more general mishaps followed, and even after deciding to leave the common studio: “Apart from what happened to Jaleh Studio, I found a way to calm my thoughts down, to not allow the limitations and a strong sense of helplessness to actually contribute to indifference and passivity. Almost everyday, after reading the papers, I would use a sharpened black pencil to draw the halftone printed images. The good and not too good news, I read them all, and drew the pictures accompanying them with a black or, occasionally, a colored pencil. I kept doing this for the next five years. Very small, very delicate.”
The Daily Notes drawings were exhibited in several exhibitions in France, the UK, Germany and Greece in the recent ten years, but they had never been properly shown in Iran until now. Some time ago, the artist moved to a new studio in Tehran, opening boxes of her past work to find the Daily Notes, prompting her to go through a review of the works by presenting them in an exhibition and compiling a book as a means of contextualization. She writes: “Today … the feeling of helplessness is again with me, as well as the need to get reduced or focused on the sharp pencil tip. I feel incapable of devising long-term projects, to hold on to a future vision. I seem drawn to the pool of the present time, drawing selected found images of the world around me. Daily Notes started at Jaleh Studio and kept going for some years … This is an attempt to better understand the world that is unfolding in and around me, to defy passivity and get ready. In hopes of calming my thoughts and keeping an unstable equilibrium, in chaotic times."
The current exhibition will launch “Daily Notes 2007-2010”: a book comprised of the images of most of the drawings in the series complimented by an introduction by the artist and three interviews: one with Thomas Erdbrink (of The New York Times), one with Abbas Kowsari (photojournalist and artist), and another with Homayoun Askari Sirizi (writer, architect and visual artist) and Azar Mahmoudian (curator and educator). The book has been published by Pejman Foundation and made at Bon-Gah. The book’s compilation and its themes bring into mind Ardeshir Mohassess’ “Current Events”, which has been featured in Dastan’s exhibitions several times.