PublicationNotes #12

Let’s talk about art education. As researchers, writers, and art historians working with artistic practices in a transcultural field, we spend our entire professional lives looking at works of art, their representational contexts, and their reception. We try to figure out the complexities that arise for contemporary artists who navigate the local — here, Iranian — and the global art contexts, traversing between perspectives, assumptions, and attributions from colonial and modern traditions as well as the alternative or multiple modern, contemporary (or not), decolonial, transcultural, and so on. The influence of art education on artistic practice is sometimes overlooked in these considerations. Yet this is precisely where we need to look in order to understand the multiple layers and complexities that influence a local art environment in a global context.

Universities continue to be sites of political negotiation, currently in relation to the war in Gaza. In Iran, too, it was and is the students who use the university as a place to articulate protest and resist the academic and political systems. It is, however, a place that is not given to them freely and which becomes a battlefield. Where, then, can (free) expression take place? The current crisis within Iranian academia, both political and intellectual, has made independent education more urgent than ever. For a good twenty years, a parallel structure of private educational institutions has been developing in Iran, specifically in the arts. Through the voices of active and concerned practitioners in the field, mohit.art NOTES #12, guest edited by curator and educator Fereshte Moosavi, explores the centrality of independent as well as informal art education and alternative forms of knowledge production as a way to rethink our understanding around learning in art today.

Fereshte Moosavi’s contribution “Alternative or Outside? The Urgency of Independent Art Education in Iran” is an investigation into the possibilities within independent art education to turn from institutional crisis to institutional liberation. In this text and series of interviews — which Moosavi conducted with Saeed Ravanbakhsh, artist and head of Charsoo Culture Art & Publication Center in Tehran; Behrang Samadzadegan, artist, curator and lecturer; Elham Puriya Mehr, curator and lecturer; Aria Eghbal, artist and founder of Aria Art Gallery & Classes in Tehran; and Mehdi Ansari, head of Shamseh Academy in Tehran — the participants discuss the potentials and problems of alternative education and the need for an emancipatory form of education.

Tehran Monoxide, which can be placed within the framework of informal education, is an ongoing project by artist Negar Farajiani formed around the notions of collaboration and knowledge production. Tehran’s air pollution problem here becomes the cause of a series of environmental investigations through workshops, talks, and exhibitions. What’s more, the educational outcome is a modus operandi in Farajiani’s practice, which instigates collaborative formats within school settings as well as public spaces to challenge the familiar norms of representation and education. To present this project, we selected and edited parts of the publication Tehran Monoxide,¹ edited by curator Ahskan Zahraei.

In the video podcast, Ashkan Zahraei, Negar Farajiani, and Fereshte Moosavi speak about the creation and development process as well as the impact of the project and publication Tehran Monoxide.

The book Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism and Knowledge by education scholars and university professors Shahrzad Mojab and Sara Carpenter, discusses a new approach to education and learning from a feminist and anti-capitalist point of view. It provides a philosophical and critical context to develop collective, thoughtful, and investigative “revolutionary” learning practices. In line with the voices of practitioners and educators presented elsewhere in NOTES #12, this text excerpt specifically argues for the pedagogical purpose of “being critical” versus “critique.”

As always, we hope you enjoy these videos, texts, and visual materials! Please take a look at our CALENDAR to discover exhibitions and events from our transcultural NETWORK.

Managing editor: Helia Darabi