Barbad Golshiri's Acts of Alterity

Abstract

Abstract In his transdisciplinary practice, artist, writer, and translator Barbad Golshiri interprets from his viewpoint located in Iran the iconic pieces of the European art history, including paintings by Jan van Eyck, Jacques-Louis David, and Kazimir Malevich. Inserting his own artistically inscribed body into the material milieus of these artists, Golshiri activates the present via transfer of the past onto the future, in an attempt to differentiate the script of history. Deleuzian approach of repetition as a means of differencing instigates this interrogation of Golshiri's Malevich cycle, comprising Quod (2010), which references Malevich's Black Square (1915); Cura; the Rise and Fall of Aplasticism, (2013), restaging in Moscow and Tehran the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (Petrograd, 1915); and post-performance object “.” (2013); as well as a series of QR code actions that continue the process of dematerialization of Black Square via social mediation. In their coded language, these works speak truth to power.