Wednesday, April 10, 2024
3:00-5:00 p.m.
Leung Conference Room (110)
280 Brook St.
Register here.
Open to Brown and RISD undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff.
This non-credit masterclass will be capped at 25 participants.
Please reach out to cmes@brown.edu if physical accommodation is needed.
About this Masterclass
This class is an introduction to Amitis Motevalli’s Golestān Revisited, a multicomponent project launched in 2017 tracing the lineage of an indigenous natural resource while renaming each rose after women, femme and girl martyrs of recent wars. The project is named after Sa’adi Shirazi’s seminal manuscript, Golestān. Motevalli will highlight how her project, through visual and preformative means, honors and documents individual women of all ages who have lost their lives to current wars of imperialism, researches the deep historical roots of colonization, and resurfaces their stories through the metaphor of the most feminine of love symbols across cultures—the rose—whose initial cultivars were found across Asia, both in China and through South and West Asia as well as North and East Africa, but were uprooted and brought to the gardens of Western Europe during the Crusades.
About the Artist
Amitis Motevalli is an artist who explores the cultural resistance and survival of people living in poverty, conflict and/or war. Her experiences as a trans-national migrant and community organizing are foundational in her work and research. Through many media, digital, analog, static and live, her work juxtaposes and contrasts iconography with iconoclasm, memorials with monuments, archive methodologies with canon. Her work intends to ask questions about archiving, documentation and canonization of histories, in particular related to violence. In this line of questioning she subverts populism by invoking the significance of a secular grassroots struggle. She is primarily based in Los Angeles, exhibiting art internationally as well as organizing to create an active and critical cultural discourse through information exchange—either in art or pedagogy—with cultural producers and educators.