Sona Safaei-Sooreh - Revolving: a family tale
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Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art 205-268 Keefer Street (Sun Wah Centre), Vancouver, British Columbia V6A 1X5
Sona Safaei-Sooreh, "Revolving: a family tale," 2021
courtesy of the artist.
Sona Safaei-Sooreh - Revolving: a family tale
Revolving: a family tale is a multimedia exhibition that revisits the semi-colonial history of the Iranian Oil Industry by Sona Safaei-Sooreh. In part, it takes the form of a comic script, printed in traditional tabloid-size newspapers, attempting to compare the story of the nationalization of the Iranian Oil Industry with present-day political affairs.
The comic characters are inspired by cartoon drawing advertisements made by Ronald Searle for the British Petroleum company back in the 1950s. Safaei-Sooreh imagined a fictional life for Searle’s characters and illustrated the life of their grandchildren who live in our current era. The new propaganda messages were born from the initial British petroleum ads with a middle-eastern twist. Further, the artist puts together video footage from an interview with BP staff when they were expelled from Iran in the 1950s and a scene from the Walt Disney movie “Cinderella” to portray the imperial attitudes of the British subjects towards Iran.
Sona Safaei-Sooreh is an Iranian–born artist based in Toronto. She holds a B.Sc. from Azad University and a BFA from OCAD University. In 2017, she graduated from the MVS program at the University of Toronto. Her practice is largely concept-driven, and in many instances, it positions itself in discourses around literary theory, political economy, and institutional critique.
Safaei-Sooreh has shown her work nationally and internationally in venues such as hinterland galerie (Vienna), Art Athina Platform Projects (Athens), Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto), Artspace (Peterborough), Mohsen Gallery (Tehran), KunstraumKreuzberg/Bethanien and nGbK (Berlin), Cite internationale des arts (Paris), De Bond (Bruges), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Thomas Erben Gallery (New York), SESC Vila Mariana (São Paulo), Aaran Gallery (Tehran), and Parkingallery (Tehran). In addition, her work was part of a travelling exhibition called PROJECT 35: VOLUME 2, which has toured around the world.
Also included in Revolving: a family tale are several video works made between 2010 and 2014, highlighting the artist’s ongoing exploration of subjects on the economy, value inequalities, and sociopolitical conditions.
Curated by Henry Heng Lu
REVOLVING: A READING GROUP
In conjunction with Centre A’s current exhibition Revolving: a family tale, we will host our first in-person public program since 2020 on Saturday, October 30, 2021, from 3 to 5 pm. The multimedia exhibition revisits the semi-colonial history of the Iranian oil industry by Sona Safaei-Sooreh.
We are inviting Dr. Dallas Hunt and artist Reyhan Yazdani to lead a reading discussion on texts chosen by the speakers. The discussion will fall under the themes of environment and ecology, colonial history, storytelling, revolution, cultural resistance, and love.
The reading group aims to support artistic and curatorial engagement by creating a space for exploring themes of the exhibition through alternative methods.
The reading group will be take place in our gallery space at Unit 205, 268 Keefer Street in the Sun Wah Centre located in the historic Chinatown on the unceded Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. We will be limiting the reading group to max. 15 participants and will be following COVID-19 protocols. The readings will be sent out a week prior to the gathering.
Participants of all levels and experiences are welcome!
About the Speakers:
Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty Eight territory in northern Alberta. He has had creative works published in Contemporary Verse 2, Prairie Fire, PRISM international and Arc Poetry. His first children’s book, Awâsis and the World-famous Bannock, was published through Highwater Press in 2018. His new book, CREELAND, is out through Nightwood Editions. Hunt is an assistant professor of Indigenous literatures at the University of British Columbia.
Reyhan Yazdani is an interdisciplinary artist/designer currently teaching at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Her creative practice revolves around themes of embodied knowledge, language, displacement and nomadic identities among others. Yazdani explores notions of de-centering practices, pluralistic understandings, untranslatability, loss and longing through installation, objects, social practice, and poetry.
She received a Master of Architecture from the University of Tehran in 2017 and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2019. She exhibited her works at galleries such as Seymour Art Gallery (2020) and Centre A (2019) and has been working as an Artist-in-Residence at Access Gallery (2021) and Shadbolt Art Centre (2021). Recent projects include a Poem in Distance publication purchased by Emily Carr University for the permanent Artist’s Books Collection of the library.