Azar Mahmoudian
April — June 2025
→ Bucharest
Azar Mahmoudian is an independent curator and educator.
“Alongside curating exhibitions or projects elsewhere, my work in Iran had been focused on creating spaces of gathering and collective study for/with artists and cultural practitioners.
This came out of an ever-growing belief that critical positions in that locality need to respond more directly to the intensities of everyday erasures and erosions. And the fact that cultural production always entails production of one own’s working condition too, whether it’s acknowledged or not.
My questions, respectively, initiated around forms of an embedded criticality, which could inhabit the political in relations other than negation, or revelation and translations to an outside. My answers expanded towards the leverage of self-organization and radical pedagogy.
I have also been observing how complex and ambivalent layers of isolation, either imposed, reclaimed, or self-affirmative, define modes of sociality and survival in that society. Thinking through a life-affirmative approach, I became attentive to the unfoldings caused by inward moves: acknowledgment of the already existing, relying on kinships and reorienting ones own relation with history.
I was part of the collective that co-organised kaf, an independent study space in Tehran, and in past 4 years have mostly been engaged with organizing an autonomous study platform for cultural workers between Tehran, and rural places in Iranian, Armenian and Kurdish mountains.
By adopting the most generic name, the school, drops any claim towards authenticity and tries to modestly see itself alongside the lineage of the anonymous, and long tradition of pedagogical experiences, which need more steadfastness than extraordinariness in their practice. The school happens both seasonally and a-rhythmically.
Both platforms refrained from having an online presence."
The residency is organised in partnership with Akademie Schloss Solitude in the frame of Solitude Exchange Network.