Please join for a listening session organised by NO NIIN with Golrokh Nafisi and Jyotsna Siddharth on Wednesday, June 16th at 2–4pm. This event will be accessible via Zoom for everyone with registration.
The listening session offers an insightful engagement into the practices of Golrokh Nafisi and Jyotsna Siddharth, and how they intermingle their politics with matters of love, work, artistic practice in both domestic and transnational spaces – envisioning a community that can come together to barter the contractual and conditional with access and existence.
NO NIIN is an online monthly magazine at the cusp of art, criticality, and love founded in January 2021 by Elham Rahmati and Vidha Saumya. The magazine functions as a platform for commissioning writers of any background to express their thoughts in the form of essays, exhibition reviews, interviews, images, poetry, playlists, and podcasts. NO NIIN aspires to be a critical locus for discourse – it offers artists and writers a space for reflection, sharing of ideas and enables conversations that develop over time. Until May NO NIIN has published three issues in March, April and May.
Outline of the talk and about the artists:
Golrokh Nafisi: New Tools of Publishing & Distribution
My illustrations influenced by political and social movements mirror our collective dreamsand our own image at the moments we rise to reach those dreams. So I need to make them ready for distribution to the public, as fast and wide as possible without any personal ownership, authorship, or signature. In 2009, when virtual social media was only just beginning to flourish, the largest political and social movement of my generation took place in Iran. My illustrations were distributed widely and went to places that I had never been. This continued in the years that followed and my work found itself in solidarity with different social and political movements around the world, be it the uprisings of the Arab world or the protests in the western cities against the neoliberal policies of economic pressures. At the same time, social media has become more exclusive and in the service of oppressive forces. Now, while apartheid algorithms are clearly censoring and directing social media’s content in the recent uprising in Palestine, I ask myself: How can we publish images designed to empower people whose voices are being muted, quickly and without falling into the many traps that exist on our ways to reach each other? What new tools of publishing and distribution can we find? What is the urgency of participation in shaping an artwork? How can the existing spaces for the presentation of artworks be transformed into spaces with a genuine collective atmosphere for audiences to work together?
Golrokh Nafisi (b. 1981, Isfahan, Iran), is an Illustrator, animator, and puppet maker experimenting with performances in public space. Situated between Amsterdam and Tehran, Nafisi works through bodies and ideologies to imagine and shape new works of forms of collective action. Golrokh studied at the Art University of Tehran in Iran and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in the Netherlands. She has frequently exhibited her work in galleries, as interventions and performances, and at film festivals. Nafisi’s aesthetic is strongly influenced by popular local handicrafts of the cities that she travels to and works in. Her illustrations are inspired by the political uprisings of the people in different geographies and are usually distributed among the demonstrators during the social-political movements.
Jyotsna Siddharth: Living in Exile
In my talk, I would like to pick up on the fact that some of us live at the fringes of the fringe and hence, constantly living in exile. The relationships that we have been familiar with all our life, become estranged as we grow up. Our surroundings, preconceived notions about life, love, and work gets challenged as we begin to lose at times our most intimate, close bonds. I will use poetry, a part of performance and verbal presentation to share my angst, anxieties, dilemmas, and aspirations of bettering the world we all inhabit.
Jyotsna Siddharth (they/them) is an actor, intersectional activist, self-taught artist, and writer. They have worked with several non-profits, bilateral organizations and are currently, an India Lead for Gender At Work. Jyotsna has been on several panels and actively involved with resistance and social movements. Their work has featured in Times of India, The Hindu, Roundtable India, Savari, Feminism in India, Smashboard, Ashoka Literature Festival, Mid-Day, The Rights Collective UK, The Citizen, India Culture Lab, Khirkee Voice and many more. Their practice spreads across intersections of social, art, activism, theatre, development, caste- gender, feminist and queer spaces. Their interestsare multidisciplinary, experimental and fluid from storytelling, embodied practice, acting, workshops, writing and building community dialogue to supporting systems for making multiple medium work collaborative, intersectional and inclusive. Jyotsna is a co-founder of Sive (2017), founder of Project Anti Caste Love (2018), Dalit Feminism Archive (2019). They co-organized the first Indian adaptation of ‘A Rapist in Your Way’- the Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis in 2019, Delhi. Jyotsna has a Masters in Development Studies from TISS, Mumbai and Social Anthropology from School of Oriental and African Studies, London and are also a recipient of Chevening Scholarship (2014). Currently, they are working on a devised solo act, a book, essays and part of inclusivity and diversity dialogue at their work, in theatre and cinema spaces and supporting Khuli Khidki in Delhi.
NO NIIN was invited by PUBLICS to organise a small gathering as part of Open Up cultural project and Parahosting Laboratory including listening and reading sessions and talks with cultural workers and independent non-profit initiatives. The idea is that by gathering different individuals and organisations together to listen to each other’s concerns and points of interest, institutional knowledge can grow wider, and more sustainable collaborative methods can be found. Open Up is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme.