You and I Have Seen the Garden from That Cold Sullen Crack
In her research-based cinematic performance, Azade Shahmiri, theater and performance artist, revisits the garden as a Living Archive of collective resistance within transformative moments of Iranian society. Wandering around the invisible or documented, repurposed or erased gardens, You and I Have Seen the Garden from That Cold Sullen Crack reclaims the peripheries, reassembling the ruptured narratives buried beneath vegetation and soil, flowing through dying water channels—qanats. It maps and tracks the layered agency and performativity of gardens by interweaving visual archives, found footage, and soundscapes with woman-to-woman letters, fragmented biographies, the performer’s ambivalent presence, and a self-reflective voice.
Gardens, bound to land and labor, remain contested. The performance, likewise unfinished and growing, stands as testimony to internal struggles and to Western interventions and orientalist framings embedded within and through them—grounds of grief and loss, and of resilience and hope.
sample
CELEBRATION OF ASHES
Tehran Contemporary Sounds Festival, Kunstraum Bethanien, Berlin, 2024
Celebration of Ashes is a collaborative audiovisual performance created by Mahtab Sabetara (music) and Baharan Eghbalzadeh (visuals). It was first presented at the Tehran Contemporary Sounds Festival in November 2024 at Kunstraum Bethanien, Berlin.
Lecture Performance Series — Jina Revolution, First 100 Days
This lecture performance series reflected on the first 100 days of the Jina Revolution through the narratives, texts, and literary fragments produced during that period.
If history could be understood as a hegemonic distortion of occurred events, then narration became a tool for intervention: a way to question, rewrite, and re-remember the past and present. Each narrative of what had occurred opened the possibility of imagining different versions of history, memory, and the future. Embodied experience and written language became instruments in this ongoing struggle over meaning.
The texts for this series were gathered through different channels, both oral and written, from authors inside and outside Iran. Together, they formed a fragmented archive of witnessing, resistance, grief, and imagination.
In collaboration with Sanaz Azimipour and Tanasgol Sabbagh, I shaped these narratives through sound and created a musical space for the stories to be heard. The music was developed alongside the readings and performed live.