Iranian Team's First Instruction Writing Meeting

Meet the Moderator/Artist

Zeren Goktan
http://www.zerengoktan.com/

Meet the Artists

Sasan Abri: http://www.silkroadphoto.com/sn/photographers/pt/full/id/85

Andrew Blanton
http://andrewblanton.com/

Amin Davaie : http://vimeo.com/user5750918,  http://davaiephoto.blogspot.com/

Patrick Litchy: http://www.voyd.com/

Vana Nabipour
http://vananabipour.com/

Allie Pohl
http://www.alliepohl.com/

Skype Meetings

Project Process

• For this process we have defined four teams; the curators, the Iranian artist team, the Turkish artist and the American artist team. The Iranian artists and the American artists will assume the roles of instructors and instructed, roles that will change depending on who the curators give the ‘inspiration instructions’ to. The Turkish artist will act as the third party.
• The curators, Morehshin Allahyari and Eden Ünlüata, will present an inspiration instruction to the instructors (beginning with the Iranian team and going back and forth between the two team). That team will then write an instruction based on the inspiration on their native language which will include a task to perform and a method of documentation. The documentation should be a format that can be transmitted through the Internet (video, sound, image, text, etc).
• The instructors will then send their instruction to the Turkish artist whom will utilize Google Translator to translate the instruction into Turkish and will possibly edit, change or correct it. He/she then will forward the translated/edited material (in thethennative language,Turkishinthiscase)totheinstructed team.
• The instructed team will again utilize Google Translator to translate the instruction and will interpret it. The instructed team will be allowed to make their own artistic choices, but they must respond to the instruction. The work done will be documented (or the documentation can be the work itself) and then sent back to the Turkish artist.
• The curatorial team will be BCC’ed on all the emails/ transmissions/exchanges. The instructors instructed/s will not communicate directly and will only communicate through the Turkish artist who will remove all direct contact information such as email, phone, skype name, website info. Both instructor and instructed artists will understand and agree that their material will get edited, changed and used for works by the Turkish artist without their consent within this project.

Project Description

Your Night/My Day,Your Day/My Night is a collaborative project curated by Morehshin Allahyari and Eden Ünlüata which excavates the process of the cultural exchange - or lack thereof - between Iran and the United States. The works generated through this project will highlight the dysfunctional nature of cultural exchange between these two cultures.

Presently, there are no direct diplomatic, trade, official artistic or intellectual contacts between between the US and Iran. All such communication and exchanges take place through third parties which further complicates the relationship and feeds the distrust while making both sides vulnerable to the agendas of third parties.

For this project, the process of art making is based on a series of invitations from the curators Morehshin Allahyari and Eden Ünlüata, called Inspiration Notes featuring 11 topics broadly interpreted in multiple cultures. These topics include: tea and coffee, games, shoes, hands, fruits, stickers, fortune telling/future telling, private and public shared lives, time, modern media - TV/Internet and visiting.

Through the Inspiration Notes, teams in each country will be asked to write instructions in their native language for the opposite team to perform and document on a given topic. However, before the opposite team receives them, the instructions will travel through an artist/ editor from Turkey who will put them through the Google Translator (Farsi>Turkish>English / English>Turkish>Farsi) and edit them as he/she sees fit - For further information and details please see ‘process’ document.

Using this 11-part series, we are not only seeking to decipher and depict the nature of the dysfunctional dialogue between Iranian and American cultures, but also seeking to reveal paths through art that may lead to a better understanding between the two cultures.