WHW Akademija

Photo by Anastasiia Guzenkova

Aria Farajnezhad (1989, Ahwaz) is a multidisciplinary artist and organizer with a background in engineering and a long-term engagement with rhythm and playing percussion. He is a sound and image examiner and his work encompasses a variety of mediums, leaning towards speculative forensis.

Farajnezhad is a former fellow at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program (Beirut, Lebanon) between 2018- 2019 and a former participant in the Spring Curatorial Program 2022: Art Geographies (Vienna, Austria). Between 2020-2022 he has been co-running the project space Circa 106. (Bremen, Germany)

Aria holds a Diploma from the faculty of fine arts at the University of Arts Bremen where he completed the Meisterschüler*innen program in July 2022. His previous two works include Toppled from the Horizontal axis, Gerhard Marcks Haus (Bremen, Germany), and Listening to the Rainbirds, BLG Forum (Bremen, Germany) both lengthy research-based sound/video installations deploying essayistic writing, editing, and poetry, and drawing to unfold over various mediums spanning from publication, acoustic improvisation to film, and sculpture.

He has also participated in the artist-in-residence at Künstlerhäuser (Worpswede, Germany) as part of the Zefak Collective, through which they initiated Future Archives (2020) which is an ongoing platform that has been invited since its formation to various events and venues to contribute among which, Association for Art History’s Annual Conference 2021(London, UK), Stadtgalerie and MM, M (Saarbrücken, Germany), Fag tips for artists space book (New York, US), Research and Waves (Berlin, Germany), Format: Walk and Talk (Bremen, Germany) and OSTEN Festival (Bitterfeld, Germany).

Artist's website, Instagram and Vimeo.

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1. Now is No Time At All, 2019, Still image from the video, camera by Veda Thozhur Kolleri, developed as part of the Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon; 2. Listening to the Raibirds, 2021, excerpt from the publication, book design by Will Lee, BLG Forum, Bremen Germany; 3. & 4. Listening to the Raibirds, 2021, installation view, photo by Ana Rodriguez, BLG Forum, Bremen Germany; 5. Toppled from the Horizontal Axis, 2022, Still image from the film, 3d design by Farzad Golghasemi, 18:49 min; 6. & 7. Toppled from the Horizontal Axis, 2022, installation view, photo by Ana Rodriguez, Gerhard Marcks Haus, Bremen Germany

Artist statement

As a Tombak player, I have as well gravitated towards modes of playing that reflect upon the break, ways in which Persian music canon gets interrogated, inside the rapture of language that the tongue constantly slips: to follow a sound and use speech as testimony, to subvert the Zinat technique and speculate a rhythm beyond the accelerated tempo and its prolonged realization, or use Bendir as performing a due improvisation, Saz o Avaaz to express unspoken words to my kin. To explore acoustic epistemologies through situated witness position with temporary loss of hearing and let it haunt the euro-modernist top-down technological quest predicated on eradication of echo. Using score to invent a new form of vocalization or resounding. put together a choir of humming to unsettle the composition of the national anthem; ways in which I could propose heterogeneity and multiplicity of voices as opposed to the homogenization and reductive unification perpetuated by state violence by erasing the other and construction of otherness. To use speculative toppling to address ways of horizontalization enacted by recycling and redistributing the fractions of the former centralized financial institution and pursue this investigation further by taking an abolitionist approach to my name.

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Collective methods as necessary condition

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