Part of Protest and Performance: A Way of Life

With Nasim Ahmadpour, Omar Berrada, Laura Raicovich, Mirene Arsanios, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi.

Pages, the bilingual (Farsi/English) artist magazine founded in 2004 by artists Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, presents a reading of Nasim Ahmadpour's performance text The Report on the Judgment Day from its latest issue Stage So Near So Far. The text will be read by Laura Raicovich, Omar Berrada, Mirene Arsanios and Nasim Ahmadpour on behalf of the four jury members followed by a conversation moderated by Defne Ayas and Kathy Noble.

The new issue, published in June 2023, consists entirely of plays and performance texts by Iranian women writers living in or outside of Iran. The authors place their writing in direct relation to the specific historical and sociopolitical conditions in which they live and work. These writings, whether based on actual experiences, fictional, or drawn from archives, deal in one way or another with the question of the stage. They create a contested space of performance that is inevitably linked to the performer’s body, whose thresholds are stretched and contracted into potentially new forms of staging. This volume was edited with the idea of extending these writings to a series of performative readings.

The Report on the Judgment Day recounts a jury meeting at the 2020 Fajr Theater Festival in Tehran. Ahmadpour, herself a member of that jury and participant in the festival, had proposed that the meeting be held publicly as a performance during the festival. However, the jury meeting was canceled due to the majority of the nominated performance groups withdrawing their participation in protest against the then evolving political situation in Iran. Written for the four members of the jury, The Report on the Judgment Day is an attempt to perform that never-held jury session. In a sense, Ahmadpour’s text points to the potentials of what is intentionally left unrealised.

Protest and Performance: A Way of Life is supported by the Ford Foundation and as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York.

Nasim Ahmadpour is a theatre director, dramatist and screenwriter. She co-founded the theatre group Don Quixote with Ali Asghar Dashti in 2003 in Tehran and has written and/or directed eight plays for the group, which have been performed in countries including Switzerland and Germany. In 2018 she won the best playwright award at Tehran TIFF. Ahmadpour has co-written five short films and scripts for feature films with Shahram Mokri. Fish & Cat and Careless Crime were screened at the 2014 and 2020 Venice Film Festival. The screenplay for Careless Crime was nominated for an award at the Asia-Pacific film festival and won the Bisato d'Oro award for Best Original Screenplay at the 2020 Venice Film Festival. Invasion was screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 2018. Nasim Ahmadpour's latest screenplays are A Fleeting Encounter, which premiered at Luxembourg Film Festival, and Where is Ava?, directed by Romed Wyder is currently in pre-production.

Omar Berrada is a writer and curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma’mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech. His work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including The Africans, a volume on racial dynamics in North Africa (2016), and La Septième Porte, Ahmed Bouanani’s posthumous history of Moroccan cinema (2020). His writing was published in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, The University of California Book of North African Literature, and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union where he co-organizes the IDS Lecture Series.

Laura Raicovich is dedicated to art and artistic production that relies on complexity, poetics, and care to create a more engaged and equitable civic realm. She is curator and editor of Protodispatch, a digital publication featuring personal perspectives of artists addressing transcontinental concerns, filtered by where they are in the world. Raicovich is also working on an in-depth research initiative titled The 31 Women which centers on the 1943 exhibition by the same name, organized by Peggy Guggenheim at her Art of this Century gallery. She has served as interim director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, a museum devoted to queer art and artists, and is the recipient of both the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship and the inaugural Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators at Hyperallergic. Until early 2018, she served as President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum. Her recent book, Culture Strike: Art and Museum in an Age of Protest (Verso 2021) addresses the ways in which museums and cultural institutions can become better spaces for more people.

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015), Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2019), and more recently, The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, and Guernica, among others. Her writing was featured collaboratively at the Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennial (2017), as well as in various artist books and projects. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College.