Event details

Please join us for the first event in MRC’s new Iranian artist workshop series, Kargah, which will be led by Yasi Alipour. The interdisciplinary artist will offer six lessons on folding—the basis of their artistic practice—and share the questions that have emerged from their decade-long repetition of this simple act.

Workshop attendees will be provided with a variety of (cultures of) paper to hold, to fold, and to share in the histories of the material. Alipour invites attendees to practically explore the kargah—Persian for “workshop”—as a form by engaging its two fundamental elements: kar, as rooted in labor, and gah, as a form of gathering, in space as well as in time.

This gathering will ground itself in aesthetics and mathematics—beyond the western canon, beyond even the written. Exploring algorithms as they (con)verge into small choreographies, workshop attendees will be provided with instructions to explore, create, and touch some of the foundational forms of art, architecture, poetry, and math in the SWANA region.

Throughout the workshop, Alipour will present recent work to elaborate on a number of axioms that they have developed as self-evidently true for and through their practice of folding:
1. عکاسی (akkasi): a reclamation of photography in embracing the ethical intimacy of mirroring;
2. نقاشی (naghghashi): an approach to painting as trace, achieved by helping it shed the weight of its historic hegemony;
3. نقشه (naghsheh): maps becoming sculptures; and,
4. معماری (me’mari): architecture as ever-present and honoring the labor and hands of the maker.