Interview | Elham Puriya Mehr

The research by Kisito Assangni on “curating as a phenomenological history of everyday life”, continues today in dialogue with Dr Elham Puriya Mehr, discussing about the possibilities of “museums as spaces for self-analysis in society”.

Kisito Assangni: How can museums and universities be used as pedagogical tools in a public sphere characterised by heightened intolerance?

Dr Elham Puriya Mehr: Thanks for your thought-provoking question. First, I need to identify two points for myself. I have to understand the positionality of the public sphere here. I hesitate of using the ‘public sphere’ term as it reminds me of the idealistic Habermasian model that implicitly confirms the institutional infrastructures of universities and museums. What functionally considers itself distinct from people’s awareness and what they resist for as well as what you called it heightened intolerance. The prepared infrastructures conceive a self-center position and therefore repeatedly recreate invisible walls between themselves and the publics.

Also, your question encourages me to think about the concept of pedagogy and its necessary relation to people. Do people require pedagogy or pedagogical tools?

The idea of pedagogy itself impel people to have enough preparation, time, and capital in order to enter into pedagogical spaces. This again builds difficulty in not facilitating conditions especially when we think about the matter of social, racial, and geographical inequality. Therefore, I see museums and universities as spaces for rethinking and self-analysis in society, not as pedagogical tools. They give us a space to recognize our positionality in synchronization with public awareness.

What are the subjective and objective elements that make cooperative curating meaningful and valuable?

I am a bit uncertain about the term curating, so I prefer to use the word curatorial if I may. I am very happy that you emphasize the words meaningful and valuable instead of productive. Well, I try to see these words in the nature of the multitude of curatorial. A condition of joint singularities that aims for various understandings through research and cooperation instead of transferring a definite cognition to viewers through the exhibition. For me, the subjective value could be found in the nature of questioning and how it generates people to research meanings and concepts through collective thinking and actions.

I also think an example of an objective element could be the potentiality of curatorial conditions and methodologies we create during pre-event, event, and after-event in a research mode which gives us time and space to continuedly flourishes situations of thinking together, questioning together, and building together.

How do curatorial strategies inform cultural institutions in contemporary society and what sort of critical and transformative potentials can be traced in exhibition cultures?

I think involving cultural institutions as the context and the content of the project in the exhibition itself is a form of informing and revisioning itself. If we enter this subject through affect and all sensorial elements aspects of cultural institutions, we would emphasize enabling visibility of the historical invisible-making machine first and then how to repair and care for this visible condition through curatorial strategies.

Exhibiting cultures has always been cynical for me and I don’t feel good whenever I go to a cultural, historical, or anthropological exhibition. I feel inactively I am observing a polite form of colonization. I think it is very important not to objectify a culture just through an exhibition, but to look at an exhibition as a threshold of our understanding of a culture. How it is possible to exhibit a culture? This is like framing a small part of a building and saying this is the shape of a city. A cabinet of curiosity. But it is possible to animate an assemblage of objects, images, and events into an exhibition to examine our understanding of a culture.

Does an exhibition count as philosophy, anthropology, sociology, etc.? How does this mode of presenting ideas compare to an essay or other more traditional academic outputs?

Well, let’s assume an exhibition is a space where various forms of exchanges and interactions are taking place. A place to sense, think, remember, explore, criticize, and discuss. These can be led us to knowledge. If we shut our eyes on the ideological and educational features of the exhibition, we can see exhibition space as an atmosphere for sharing, learning, and changing through the lenses of philosophy, anthropology, science, sociology, etc., or even altogether. So, the exhibition can be an arena of exchange for presenting and producing knowledge collectively.

In a world of post-truth politics, how can art speak to the problem of the real, truth and facticity from inside a disciplinary practice?

It is a good question. In a world of post-truth politics where we need to take care of our eyes, cognition, and memories, art has the ability to open different doors of thinking regarding exploring the real, truth, and facticity through its content, medium, and presentation. But the truth is art itself needs to find a foreign position in relation to each situation instead of giving a solution. It first needs to exit from the process of urged cognition and see where it is, and how it can create an interruption in this process of learning and archiving that has been historically created in our mind. So, the nature of activism of art per se repeatedly invites us to question and challenge our manipulated memory.

How does the recent mass movement of people change the curation of the future?

The role of curators in curation and how they define the future can give an answer to this question. How do they see their role and place in all social, political, and economic momentums? Are they inside the movements or just display the representational images of them? Do they mediators who manipulate people’s imagination for how to make the future or are healers who appear in different situations to prepare bodies and minds for making the future? I think the answer can be found in not being a curator but in becoming a curator. When curation comes in the middle to redefine itself and new relations. In this position, curation leads to the formation of new social relations and opens the ways of interaction between singularities that would not be unable to communicate with each other. A kind of knot for social entanglement and exploration. Curation can facilitate a passage, a transition, a gateway, a window to some place beyond whose status is suspended between representation and reception, and opens passages to social movements.

Any book or exhibition recommendations?

I would recommend:
O’Neill. P, Steeds. L, & Wilson. M, (2017), “How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary
Art and Curatorial Discourse,” The MIT Press;
Hlavajova Maria, Sheikh Simon, (2017), “Former West, Art and the Contemporary after 1989,” The MIT Press;
Hansen. M.V, Henningsen. A.F, & Gregersen. A, (2019), Curatorial Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating,” Routledge Publication;
Martinon Jean-Paul, (2013), “The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating,” Bloomsbury Publishing.

images: (cover 1) I Am Here project, artist: Mahdyar Jamshidi, Curatorial tour by Elham Puriya Mehr, Aqda Desert, Yazd, Iran, May 2016. Photo by Ali Zanjani (2) Dave Beech’s lecture at LIVE Assembly: Repair & Care, a panel with Irit Rogoff and Maria Hlavajova, curatorial team leader: Elham Puriya Mehr, organized by LIVE Biennale Performance Art Society, November 6, 2021, screenshot from the video.