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Turin, Piedmont, Italy closed Visit museumarrow_right_alt

closed Safar: Journey to the Middle East.

The show

About sixty shots made by Farian Sabahi in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Yemen between February 1998 and spring 2005 and exhibited for the first time.
In Persian and Arabic, Safar means travel. A word that encompasses the multiple meanings of the exhibition: it tells the travels faced by Farian Sabahi, the Lands and the people portrayed and at the same time urges the visitor to make a journey, double, geographical and emotional. Thus, the verses of the Persian-speaking poet Rumi embroidered by the young artist Ivana Sfredda welcome the visitor: Even if you have no feet, choose to travel within yourself, verses aimed at evoking the importance of travel and openness to other cultures. in the process of personal growth.
Journalist and scholar Farian Sabahi gives us back a world seen and immortalized shortly before and immediately after terrible wars began in some of these countries, a world that was distorted even where the war was not fought, but where the scars of old conflicts remain or where progress is strongly and arrogantly opposed to the more traditional aspects of everyday life.
Alberto Negri in the preface of the catalog writes “Nothing we see in these shots is foreign to us. It's a different world but not that exotic. We have contributed heavily to its destruction. It is difficult to tell what it meant to live in Iraq or Syria in recent years, under the bombings, barricaded without ever being able to get out. Death came from above with air raids or missiles, or silently on the blade of a knife. And many of the monuments, walls, houses, people's faces that are portrayed here are no longer there. Lost forever. This is why the image, even the most innocent, like the smile of a child, is not simply a memory but an indictment ”.
The restitution of this feeling is given by the site specific installation, the black cube becomes a timeless space in which photographs alternate like memories of old travels, where it is difficult to distinguish a before from an after. The photographs, originally taken in 100 ASA Fuji sensia slide in color and printed for the exhibition on matte museum paper, are presented without frames, without narrow borders, but hung on a tuna fishing line to evoke the precariousness of life in the Middle East , just hanging by a thread. A transparent thread, which cannot be seen but is very resistant and at the same time represents the context within which lives are often imprisoned due to dictatorships and conflicts. The fishing line also evokes death, lives hung up, imprisoned and then denied, as Farian Sabahi says "the fishing line recalls the Mediterranean and the many victims of these years".
The images are accompanied by the Italian and Iranian passports with visas for those countries, the Nikon camera and the lenses used, the recorder. And again the pages of the newspapers of the time, including the articles and reports on IlSole24Ore signed by Farian Sabahi, fixed as on a bulletin board.
Arabic, Persian, Italian, French and English are the languages that animate the sound carpet, voices that embrace the visitor and carry him "inside" the story are by the Turkish writer and Nobel Prize for Literature Orhan Pamuk, by Father Paolo dell'Oglio, the Syrian poet Adonis, a fisherman on the Tigris, the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, a homosexual in Dubai, the former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami, the architect Darab Diba, the philosopher Dariush Shayegan, the Pakistani lawyer and activist Bilqis Tahira, by the Azerbaijani historian Altay Geyushev, by the Azerbaijani artist and gallery owner Aida Mahmudova, by Pierpaolo Pasolini, by the Yemeni activist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize Tawakkol Karman, by the writer Azar Nafisi. To dismiss the visitor again the verses of Rumi in which the journey is an experience that leads to knowledge and, in our case, to the rejection of the dualism between West and East, to decide not to declare oneself belonging to one world or another.

I am not from the East or the West.
I have put away the duality
and viewed the two worlds as one.

Timetable and tickets

Address

Via San Domenico, 9-11
10100 Turin

Contacts

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