For details of the concert click HERE

For an audio sample cluck HERE

Hamid Motebassem Composer and conductor
Salar Aghili Vocal Soloist
Arpej Khayat teymoorian Percussion
Behzad Rooshan pour Santour
Ramin Azimian Tar
Arman Sigarchi Barbat
Pejman Zahedian Bamtar
Marina Tantanozi Flute
Sophie- Katrin Stahl Oboe
Vinesh Dijkstra Clarinet
Theo Mazajchik Violin І
Aleksandra Stadniczenko Violin I
Patrick Heckmanns Violin І
Wojciech Watras Violin II
Magdalena Barszcz Violin II
Joanna Malinowska Violin II
Arben Ademi Viola
Paloma Ortas Viola
Rolando Fernandez Cello
Marlies Elisabeth Muijzers Cello
Ela Yatmaz Double Bass

Neda with Navaz

In this week’s show we interview singer Neda Jalali, front woman for the Iranian-blues band Navaz from Canada and give away two tickets to see Hamid Motebassem’s Iranian-Western fusion orchestra: Pardis.

Together with Neda we sample songs from her latest album Onsu – The Other Side, discuss the forthcoming one and Neda’s very early introduction to the oration of poetry by her father, who used to bribe his children to learn classical Persian poems by heart. The music of Navaz can be characterised by a soothing, refined quality both deep and enlivening both at once. Most of the songs are poems by Persian greats set to music, but one very particular song was written by Neda to expose certain taboos in Iran.

Pardis is a musical oeuvre for Iranian and Western instruments. Hamid Motebassem, the world-renowned composer, has released over twenty records and worked with many great musicians and singers of note. This time by creating a piece for a larger group of Iranian and western instruments he is taking his writing futher and with the vocals of Salar Aghili it promises to be an noteworthy performance.

Salar Aghili performed “Endless Ocean” by Saeed Farajpouri, and “In the Name of the Red Rose” by Hamid Motebassem with the Dastan Ensemble.
On February 4, 2012, Pardis will have its first international stage performance with Salar Aghili’s vocals, conducted by Hamid Motebassem at London’s Cadogan Hall.

• Cadogan Hall London
• Saturday, 4 February 2012
• Time: 20:00 – 22:00

Tickets range from £20-£60 but to win two complimentary tickets simply email in: what is the meaning  of Onsu, Navaz’s last album: all answers to sixpillarstopersia at resonancefm dot com

With it writer and director Ashghar Farhadi illustrates the phenomenal pressures exacted on families, some of which are specific to Iran, and also the terrible effect of divorce on children who have to choose between not just parents, but countries. There are many levels on which this film pronounces cinematic excellence, Farhadi heads an exemplary team both in front of and behind the camera, but the main appeal of the film is this central universal point. So what makes it specifically Iranian?

To me the stifling dilemma put on Termeh the daughter is one unique to Iranians today who have the means to leave, while Razieh is faced with different but equally as afflictive pressures put on her by her class, religion and sex. Also the fact that swearing on the Qur’an is the pivotal point at which the truth comes out, as opposed to previous scenes in the law courts or before friends and family. For was it more than superstition that drove Razieh to withhold? Many have committed perjury in court but at home, inside the heart, surely the truth has a sanctified place reserved for one’s spirit.

“Q from Shockya: I think the film provides a portrait of Iranian women and Iran in general, that is very different and obviously more fully realized than the portrait we receive through much of the mainstream media here in the States. That big contrast between tradition and modernity, is that very much on the surface in Iran?

Farhadi: No, actually it’s not on the surface. It’s in the depths, and that’s what makes it more dangerous. A malady whose symptoms are externalized and can be seen can be addressed and treated quickly. But an ailment that is hidden inside your body and only makes itself known from time to time is very dangerous. I think I have come to call this a hidden war.”

http://oscar.go.com/nominees/foreign-language-film/iran-a-separation

BURY MY HEART VI

13.30 Monday 23rd, 20.30 Sunday 29th January on www.resonancefm.com established artist Farhad Ahrarnia discusses the concepts behind his work, how he became interested in the medium of embroidery and his opinion on the driving forces of foreign policy in the press.

Ahrarnia’s current solo show Canary in a Coal Mine continues at Rose Issa Projects until 25th February 2012, 260 Kensington High Street, W8 6NA.  The domestic, and so caged, canary – compelled to sing even in the dark of sooty and cavernous mines until the moment it dies – becomes a symbol for the role of the artist, or perhaps ‘the one who is aware’, the one who sacrifices themselves in warning of oncoming crisis to others. Ahrarnia, from Shiraz in Iran, lives partly in Sheffield a town that played an important role in the UK’s long mining history and legacy.

The seemingly coded stitching on Ahrarnia’s work is reminiscent of the encoded signs of surrealist Miró or Kandinsky and if they had perhaps not been carried out in the considered form or embroidery, might appear to be the kind of action painting we’ve come to know from experimental artists like Pollock, or the automatic drawings of André Breton. Ahrarnia stitches on images from found material, and often pairs them images of the east that appear as if they were made using the cut-up technique of the surrealists, but in fact are disembodied fragments of architecture -  easily recognisable as eastern but not easily identifiable.

Like Maurizio Anzeri, Ahrarnia uses found images as his starting point. The significance for Ahrarnia is the shared legacy Iran has with the West: the translations of Western films into Iranian made them extremely popular, now they are banned. How much of the fibre of Iran is made up of these images? It is perhaps beyond measure, undoubtedly significant. Both Ahrarnia and Anzeri contrast the vintage images with bright modern-looking thread, Ahrarnia going so far as to use large sequins and shimmering string especially, he says to refract light back to the onlooker. This stark contrast suggests modernity layered over the past, and the creation of a space where the two worlds converge and where the still image, embedded as it is in our history, is disturbable, is something we can yet interact with and perhaps rewrite.

With Ahrarnia there is none of the stringy trailing of Ghada Amer’s work, or the figurative decoration of Michael Raedecker’s embroidery. In fact his very measured and geometric designs, while left unfinished and often trailing, speak more of mathematics’ Voronoi diagram than decoration, of meditation and strategy rather than accident. Ahrarnia tells me that while the work in fact takes shape during it’s making, he lives with each piece of work for some time contemplating the work until he considers it finished.

Also in this show are the popular silver-bronze shovel heads and dustpans that Ahrarnia displayed in Art Dubai 2011, called Dustpan of History. The details in these refer to the pre-Islamic history of Persepolis, Mesopotamia, and Pharaonic Egypt. There is a resonance between the pointed tips of the silver shovel heads and the embroidery needles left in mid stitch in the embroidered works:  both suggest the action of piercing or digging into our past, uncovering layers of things past and disturbing the surface.

They remind me of Heaney’s famous poem Digging where the poet describes both his father and his grandfather in the act of digging:
He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

- (1966)

This show is broadcast Monday 13.30 GMT January 16th, repeated the following Sunday 20.30.

www.resonancefm.com/listen

Piers Secunda is confident when he talks about about his sculpted paintings, for which he uses extremely thick paint as a sculpting medium. And this is not the only art process he subverts. By taking crude oil as the basis of his silk screen prints of early oil drilling in 1930′s USA, he willingly conflates medium and topic matter while professing that he has no political position to take.

In our interview Secunda discusses the hairy moments spent collecting bullet hole casts at an Afghanistan suicide bomb attack site and his thought process behind his solo show on display last month at Aubin Gallery, London.

My notes are: Aubin did a great job creating the space as set out by Secunda, the artist spent a little time understanding the place on his short visit after casting the bullet holes – this didn’t come out in the show, I would have appreciated that, with Secunda technical interest supersedes international relations and politics, none of the history of crude oil protest in art is referenced although I see the silk screens as direct decedents from the long history of art-protest against oil especially at the Tate in 2010, and finally the Taliban were funded by the US in the Soviet-Afghan war during the 80s, perhaps some of the bullet holes he has cast were even made with guns left over from that terrible era.

This show is broadcast Monday 9th January, 13.30 GMT, repeated Sunday 15th 20.30 GMT.

www.resonancefm.com/listen

There’s also time in the show to sample Shafinury’s music, which at times hits the majestic here, wouldn’t you agree?

Omid Salehi “My Car is My Love” series

Highlights of a conversation between writer Malu Halasa with curator Rose Issa at the National Portrait Gallery December 2011. “Documentary portrayals of reality can threaten the preferred narratives of authoritarian religious regimes [...] and can also thwart Western misconceptions.”  From the pamphlet by Malu Halasa Alternative Histories especially for the Chasing Mirrors season of which this discussion was part.

This show will air Monday 13,30 and repeat Sunday 20.30 GMT www.resonancefm.com/listen

]]> http://sixpillarstopersia.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/middle-eastern-photography-12th-18th-december/feed/ 2 sixpillarstopersia 28-my-car-is-my-love-tehran http://sixpillarstopersia.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/rock-climbing-and-bubbles/ http://sixpillarstopersia.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/rock-climbing-and-bubbles/#comments Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:57:00 +0000 sixpillarstopersia http://sixpillarstopersia.wordpress.com/?p=945 Continue reading →]]> Monday 5th December (repeats the following Sunday 20.30 GMT), director Leyla Pope discusses her year in Iran, a recent BBC 2 film debut and the project with which she took Welsh women rock climbers to exchange with their Iranian women counterparts.

Based in Wales, Leyla finds a traditional Welsh love story that is full of the bittersweet depths of an Iranian myth. Her other short Bubbles is reviewed by Frost Magazine as: “a short film that you don’t want to end.”

Bubbles Trailer from Leyla Pope on Vimeo.