Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko | Lovers' Wind
Western Front Gallery 303 East 8 Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia V5T 1S1
Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, “Lovers’ Wind,” 2024
video still (courtesy of the artists)
Opening Reception:Sep 14, 2024, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Western Front is pleased to present Lovers’ Wind, a multi-channel video installation by the Toronto-based artists Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko whose collaborative filmmaking practice engages speculation, historical fiction, and documentation to excavate existing narratives and uncover the power relations and subjectivities shaped by them.
Developed over three years of archival and community research, the exhibition circles around the story of the French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse and his last film, Bād-e Sabā (The Lovers’ Wind) (1978). Commissioned by the Imperial State of Iran to document the country’s history and modernization, Lamorisse’s film was largely shot from a helicopter to produce sweeping views of Iran’s natural and built environments, and narrated by a voiceover personifying its winds. Unhappy with the original edit, the monarch Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi requested Lamorisse return to film additional sequences emphasizing the industrialization of Iran, which ultimately led to the filmmaker's death in 1970 when his helicopter crashed at Karaj Dam near Tehran during production.
Created a half-century later, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko’s exhibition both continues and deconstructs Lamorisse’s project.