Скачать или смотреть Pamela Karimi | On Art and Advocacy in Iran

Night 3, May 20th
Pamela Karimi specializes in the study of modern and contemporary art, architecture, and visual culture of the Middle East. She received her PhD from MIT and is now a Professor of history of art and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her publications include Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran: Interior Revolutions of the Modern Era (2013), The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the Middle East: From Napoleon to ISIS (co-editor, 2016), Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice (2022), and Women, Art, Freedom: Artists and Street Politics in Iran (forthcoming in 2024). Karimi is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the intersection of design and environmental challenges in the Middle East.

Summit Two, 2024
Chthonic Realism: Summoning Ghosts and Monsters

Reality is Chthonic in the sense that it is not entirely revealed in any relations. For a realist, the world is not only the world-for-us, reduced to human access, but rather there is always a surplus. Accordingly, Chthonic Realism is a term that attempts to take into account the existence of the world-in-itself, apart from any relation, and, certainly, the world-without-us, the world of Inhumans, as opposed to the world-for-us, a world merely reduced to human correlation.* The term Chthonic also brings to mind the word Cthulhu. In various cultural and mythological contexts, “chthonic” is often used to describe deities, spirits, or forces that are related to the underworld, or the afterlife. Summoned from a dimension outside of time and space beyond the limits of human understanding, Cthulhu – a tentacular Lovecraftian cosmic monster – has appeared in many different texts playing different roles from an otherworldly monster in horror novels to a metonymic figure for speculative and metaphysical in contemporary philosophy. This creature is an inhuman entity coming from the darkness of reality – somewhere beyond human finitude – that threatens our world and shakes the pillars of human understanding.Chthonic Realism: Summoning Ghosts and Monsters explores the concepts of horror, speculation, the unknown, and the future. How things of the past can teach humans to gain a better understanding of reality. What happens when contemporary artists summon the ghosts of antiquity or monsters beyond the boundaries of time and space? And how things of the past can beckon us through the obscurity of the unknowable and towards a multitude of Futures?