Rouzbeh Shadpey
Forgetting Is the Sun
From February 8 to March 30, 2024
Opening on February 8 at 6 pm
— Facebook event
Rouzbeh Shadpey’s work explores anti-colonial pathophysiologies of illness and weariness, with a focus on the aesthetics and poetics of diagnosis. Interested in how concepts of health and illness are shaped by scientific racism, clinical language, and structures of debilitation, he reassembles medical concepts across artistic, academic, scientific, and literary registers of knowledge in order to reinvest these with poetic potential and political valence.
Forgetting Is the Sun seeks to restore dignity to the act of forgetting. The video essay juxtaposes footage of the artist’s grandmother silently counting her tespih while being administered a medical memory test with borrowed footage from two essay films that challenge state-sanctioned regimes of remembering: the Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1962), and the Moroccan poet, filmmaker, and writer Ahmed Bouanani’s Mémoire 14 (1971). Weaving together the falsely dichotomized registers of biological memory and collective history, Forgetting Is the Sun recontextualizes Farrokhzad and Bouanani’s defiance of state-sanctioned remembrance through the lens of individual forgetting—and its resistance to medical capture.
Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, writer, and musician with a doctorate in medicine and indefatigable fatigue. He has exhibited and performed at TULCA (Ireland), documenta fifteen (Germany), The Mosaic Rooms (UK), Centre CLARK, MUTEK (Montréal), and more. His writing has been published in a variety of artistic and para-academic journals. His musical practice, under the name GOLPESAR / گلپسر, combines Iranian sonics, electric guitar, and avant-garde electronics. He lives between Tiohtià:ke / Montréal and Berlin.
Session
Session 35
Rouzbeh Shadpey
On February 22, 2024 at 7 pm
Other exhibition
Sofía Gallisá Muriente & Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
From February 8 to March 30, 2024
Mediation
À l’image — Takeover 7
À l’image — Takeover is a participatory art series in which, over two years, a group of young Montrealers intervenes and responds to Dazibao’s exhibition programming, collaborating with each other and their mentor, artist Veronica Mockler.
Dazibao thanks the artist for his generous collaboration as well as its advisory committee for their support.
Dazibao receives financial support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the ministère de la Culture et des Communications and the Ville de Montréal.
Dazibao acknowledges that it is located on the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá: ka Nation and that Tiohtiá:ke / Montreal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations, and today, is home to a diverse population of Indigenous as well as other peoples. Guided by ethics of respect, listening, and awareness, Dazibao commits to a continued reflection regarding the deep-rooted and systemic challenges tied to accessibility and inclusivity in the arts and beyond, and endeavors to apply such reflections to all aspects of its activities and governance.