Kourosh Erfanian & Aghigh Afkhami | "Strident Images": Electric Room 20/50

Dastan is pleased to announce a photo installation by Kourosh Erfanian and Aghigh Afkhami titled “Strident Images” at Electric Room. The show will be open to public view from December 29 to January 3, 2017. The presentation consists of approximately 200 photographs by the two artists.
On “Strident Images”, Morad Moazami writes: “Though it’s long been said that music is a universal language, often unsaid is that some music is less heard than others. Established, ever-present languages are given free rein to speak to the masses and form universal bonds, while the others are isolated inside their own echo chambers. These more insulated languages might be just as worthwhile and as profound as all those grander narratives, and yet, they often cannot help but become subsumed by the global mainstream.
Setting the universal shoulder to shoulder with the distinct, Kourosh Erfanian’s photography of well-established musicians at notable North American venues offers a stunning contrast with Aghigh Afkhami’s dynamic images of budding musicians in make-shift studios.
Erfanian’s work puts on view a class of musicians at the height of their musical powers. These photos are marked by the versatility with which these performers are wielding their bodies and instruments on stage. Against these stand Afkhami’s images, marking the lives of aspiring artists in the same age-group striving to reach the same heights, making do with anything that can provide them with the space with which to run through their talents and towards that grand fairy-tale stage.
Rather than display images of musicians in musical spaces, these photographs hope to communicate the potency of music as a universal language, as something capable of creating parallel narratives that cannot help but both complement and propel each other onward.
While a photograph is unable to make these musicians play their songs out loud, it is still a fitting medium with which to put on view the loud and urgent spiritedness that brings life to the music itself. Through these images, the inequality intrinsic to music as a universal language is suddenly made equal; rank and status made meaningless. This leaves only passion to blaze ahead at the forefront of it all.”

Special Thanks to: Morad Moazami, Kiarash Alimi, Arash Zarifian, Alidad Jafari Jalali, Asal Maleki, Ava Rasti