OPENING RECEPTION & PERFORMANCES

Thrusday July 24 from 7:00 - 10:00 pm

Unpack Studio is pleased to present j be j, a collaborative exhibition curated by Zoya Honarmand and Maryam Taghavi.

j be j is a curatorial project that activates a space for correspondence between artists based in Iran and artists based elsewhere. Throughout the course of the project, participants from each location work together in order to trace one another's proposals in their own locales. For this iteration - the first iteration of j be j - seven artists and one theorist/translator inhabit, through a series of conversations, the space between Tehran and Toronto as they respond to the theme of distance. This space ultimately lends itself to contemplating, utilizing and elaborating on the act of translation, extended across both literal and metaphorical dimensions. This laboratorial exhibition aims to investigate the dynamics, tensions and potentials of dual agency in production, to relinquish the privileging of production over process, to enable a more immediate interaction between different artistic discourses and find points of contact between them.

The Toronto exhibition at Unpack Studio consists of works from Simin Keramati in dialogue with Gein Wong, Keyvan Mohtadi in dialogue with Francisco Fernando Granados, Neda Razavipour in dialogue with Manolo Lugo and Peyman Shafieezadeh in dialogue with Maggie Flynn. The Toronto-based works will be exhibited in Tehran at Azad Art Gallery in the month of July.

PHOTO: Manolo Lugo