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an ajayeb’s network making (2017) - multimedia installation (1 channel looped video on TV, pop-up book, printed notes and images on photo paper large scale on the floor and mounted)
Produced and presented by a.pass, September 2017 Brussels. With the kind support of Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Installation of a station for research presentation in the context of the exhibition No Communication Without Noise - five a.pass researches, curated by Laura Herman. The video and the pop-up book materialize a slice into the process of intense artistic research in a.pass during 2016-2017. While each of the components of the installation embody different energies (savage, omnivorous, fragmentary, and accidental) towards knowledge, they compose together ‘a place of study’ that ventures into the thickness of a speculative work on Persian medieval bestiaries.

This project is about Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa ghara'ib al-mawjudat (Persian: عجایب المخلوقات), in short ajayeb: a cosmographic encyclopedic knowledge-assemblage from the Middle Ages, more known in Europe as The Book of Wonders. In trying to explore the intensity and plasticity of lived compositions proliferating in their world, the authors of ajayeb created reports of the world in dense and textured stories of entanglements of affect, attention, the senses, and matter. Ajayeb’s textual aesthetic body is ‘a once lived affect,’ pushing a present into a composition, an ‘expressivity’ that tries to guess and describe ‘what is the world up to’ in little animal moments, small-time materialist scenes, as well as macrocosmic, big-time world formations.


video, one channel TV - part of the installation “an ajayeb’s network making” 2017 Brussels a.pass
<b>view of the installation 'an ajayeb’s network making'</b><br /> The reading of ajayeb portraits a global (and therefore ethical) consciousness at the end of 12th century Middle-South Asia. It mobilizes descriptive practices of poetics and natural history in a Middle Persian corpus. In ajayeb I am learning cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures and pasts, to study the radical poetic force of the Persian texts, to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers, and to open up an approach to a dauntingly complex region of islamicated thought. (Not the ideological enterprise of “Islam,” which is usually badly politicized in the historical memory of the West.) Ajayeb’s version of World are stories of historically nonhuman people in descriptive intra-actions with reality. In it humans and language are part of the configuration of the world. In my work on ajayeb I am becoming more and more committed to learn ways of having stories meant to pull me into the sentience of the world I am in; give it density and texture. ajayeb pop-up book<br /> As a project of narrative remediation, to re-story, to stage matters of care differently, far from being “after the fact,” I crafted this sketch of a pop-up book to learn hosting multiplicity of bodies, characters and materialities to approach ‘description’ as “speculative theory in practice of how a (described) world works.” <b>snapshot of http://ajayeb.net/ </b><br/> Ajayeb.net hypertext is a growing bibliography enacted “to provide a feast of reading pleasures.” A computer interface, a word scrambler and sequencer, a site for writing, and a game of guessing that I am building for my research inquiry, initially as a search engine for my notes. <i>fat pink boy abstraction</i><br /> analogical stories for ajayeb critical bestiaries





© 2018 Sina Seifee a.pass a.pass Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen