Pejvak
If Need Be
Z33 presents If Need Be, the first European solo exhibition of Pejvak (Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson). The artist duo shows entirely new work, consisting of miniatures, sculptures, architectural interventions and more.
If Need Be is a constellation of stories about water scarcity. Giving equal weight to gossip, legend and historical fact, Pejvak string together a series of hallucinatory events in the recent and distant past. These histories revolve around a group of remarkable characters whose lives intersected with major political and ecological revolutions. Their stories involve artificial glaciers, dams in the desert, and other human attempts to bring water under control.
In collaboration with authors, playwrights, composers, miniaturists, calligraphers, translators and artefacts, Pejvak takes the role of an unreliable narrator, situating the struggle for water within the struggle for the historical record. In this way, they draw attention to the role of imagination in history writing. How much of the past has been fabricated? Which version do we believe?
Made possible by the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts
In collaboration with: Mojtaba Abu Talebi, Timur Akhmetov, Javad Azari, Masoud Borbor, Dina Cheraghvand, Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Anna Engelhardt & Sasha Shestakova), Benjamin Filler, Hamid Ghezlou, Rudy Guedj, Bahar Modiri, Irakli Qolbaia, Anisa Sabiri, Farshad Tavakoli, Lisa Vetkhova
Curator: Tim Roerig
