Pre-last Thursday of June the 22nd, we will welcome artist, architect, researcher and publisher Golnar Abbasi in the SEA Foundation’s reading circle. Together we will read the suggested essay called Women Reflected in Their Own History published by e-flux in October 2022. The text was anonymously written by L., originally published in Farsi on the Iranian feminist platform Harass Watch (September 2022), and  its first English translation was published on the Arab ezine Jadaliyya (October 2022).

Women Reflected in Their Own History

The essay written by L. who draws from her experience of living in Iran under the rule of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In September 2022, protests erupted in the country after a young Kurdish woman, Jina (Masha) Amini, was arrested by the “morality police” because of “improper hijan”, and killed in police custody. L., who went to demonstrate alongside other women and people against the oppressive regime, elaborates on closing a gap between seeing the images of protests and being physically part of the moving, stimulating body in the street.

The host of this reading fold, Golnar Abbasi, finds the essay relevant to the SEA Foundaiton’s currently researched fold #07 on Solidarity as it allows us to think about revolutions through an economy of images, the images which make the bodies of women and queer people visible, and speculates about the forms of resistance on the ground and in the virtual space that connect us. The facelessness and namelessness of the writer not only opens up the conversation on solidarity with non-human and material things, but also raises questions about the possibility of solidarity within the spectacle economy of the artistic and cultural field. It makes space to think about whose bodies we connect to in solidarity, and how.

L.

We do not know L. And we perhaps do not need to know much about her, either. Just as she preferred, we read her in her anonymity.

Golnar Abbasi

Golnar Abbasi is an artist, architect, researcher, and publisher. Her work consists of a hybrid of practices such as research, writing, curating, organising, independent publishing, teaching, and spatial intervention. She is a founder and editor of Sarmad, a platform dedicated to the politics of image; and a co-founder of the collective WORKNOT! devoted to discussing precarities of living practices via critical spatial practice. Her work is concerned with the notion(s) of spatiality, coloniality, practices of resistance and construction of histories. 

She holds a Masters’s degree from The Berlage and has been in residence at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Faculty of Architecture and Urban Environment, TU Delft, where she conducts her academic project on the politics of domesticity. She teaches at Willem de Kooning Academie, Piet Zwart Instituut (MIARD),  and explores experimental pedagogical practices within the framework of Sarmad. 

Golnar Abbasi website

The programme of reading sessions:

25.05.2023 reading with Charlotte Jarvis
in fold #07 on Solidarity

30.03.2023 reading with Doris Hardeman
23.02.2023 reading with Risk Hazekamp
26.01.2023 reading with Gladys Zeevaarders
in fold #06 on Reimagining

27.10.2022 reading with Anna Zvyagintseva
05.10.2022 reading with Jun Zhang
25.08.2022 reading with Christopher van Ginhoven Rey
in fold #04 on Awakening

02.12.2021 reading with Laura Castro
18.11.2021 reading with Sophia Holst
16.09.2021 reading with Amy Franceschini
in fold #02 on Commons

08.07.2021 reading with Sheng-Wen Lo
17.06.2021 reading with Katarina Jazbec
20.05.2021 reading with Mari Kesi-Korsu
in fold #01 on Empathy

More any suggestions for reading? Check out the Solidarity recommended booklist