Dates: 26 November - 17 December 2021

Location: Parallel Circuit Gallery, Tehran, Iran

REST installation view by Matin Jameie, 2021

Parallel Circuit presents the latest installation of Sepideh Zamani titled “Rest".

"Rest" is a return to an installation in the past; A project that began five years ago and will now be completed with structures from the same project. Sepideh’s choices in installation are shaped by the connection between the earlier works and the newer ones. According to her: “The main subject in these works is not the work itself but how the work could be described.” In fact, it can be said that this show is a memorial to her previous project.

Sepideh Zamani (born 1986, Tehran, Iran) graduated in sculpture at Tehran University of Art. She started her career as a graphic designer in advertising agencies and continues to work design alongside her artistic activities. In 2008, Sepideh accompanied by five other artists founded Tehran Carnival, an artist collective creating underground public art in the city of Tehran. Prominent features of her work include the speed in the work process and the use of humor, repetition, and movement in her narratives.

Personal Ocean | Tehran Carnival (Public Art Group) | 2013

Binoculars | Tehran Carnival (Public Art Group) | 2014

Tehran Carnival is a group of six women who create their artworks in different places around Tehran. Being rejected from official artistic establishments, these women continued to work independently of mainstream institutions and in the process have forged a new field of artistic creation in Iran.

Their works have considerable innovative characteristics; they are mostly grandiose installations situated in quiet and marginalized areas around the city. In analyzing the characteristics of Tehran Carnival's work, they appear to conform to the paradigms set forth by Patricia C. Philips work, Out of Order: The Public Art Machine, most notably her conceptions of 'Public Space' and 'Public Art'. They made fantasy modifications and temporary installations in different parts of Tehran, including the City Theater area, Darband Mountainside, the University of Art, sides of highways, sidewalks, inside footbridges, and so on. The number of these projects reached more than twenty in less than two years.

The urban interventions by the Tehran Carnival might be considered as belonging to a different experimental paradigm in post-studio, post-gallery practices, which doesn’t comprise engagement with specific issue-based or discursive content but is marked by relying on the inherent potentialities of the urban space and attempting to surprise and engage the audience, this time with whimsical, fanciful ideas. They mainly seek to dispose of the barriers and complications of the formal art world and at the same time challenge the urban surroundings. Their works hover between fine arts and street art, as they contain some of the characteristics of both models. Their spontaneous approach which did not seek to be licensed and/or sponsored, together with their direct interaction with the city space, is similar to the pattern of street art, while the fact that they are contemporary artists who once studied art, frequented art galleries and artistic communities, and got inspired by ideas shared in the global contemporary art community connects them to the art world.

Tehran Carnival consisited of: Sepideh Zamani, Ayda Alizade, Mahtab Alizade, Elnaz Ezati, Elmira, and Elmira Yousefi

Source: Field Journal

REST by Sepideh Zamani at Parallel Circuit Gallery, Tehran

I Was Seven The Day I Came Back Home Completely Soaked by Gilbert Hage at Galerie Tanit, Beirut

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