Michael Stevenson: Celebration at Persepolis (2008)

“The longest state banquet of the twentieth century.

Michael Stevenson revisits the site of an infamous week-long party held in 1971 by the Shah of Iran amongst the ruins of the ancient Persian city of Persepolis. Reconstructing part of the temporary architecture built for the celebrations (itself now a ruin) Stevenson looks at this pivotal moment in Iranian history which led towards the subsequent cultural revolution.

In June 2007 Stevenson exhibited a reconstruction of one of the guest tents in its current state, at actual scale, at Art Basel 38. The publication is an expanded version of this Basel presentation.”

Edited by Nav Haq and Elisa Kay
Texts by Martin Clark and Michael Stevenson
Publisher Christoph Keller Editions, Zurich, and Arnolfini, Bristol, 2008
ISBN 3905829487, 9783905829488
64 pages
via Corner College

WorldCat

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Slavs and Tatars: Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz (2013)

Beginning as an investigation into the apparently disparate events that bookend the twentieth and twenty-first century – the collapse of Communism and the Islamic Revolution in Iran – Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz traces unlikely points of convergence in Iran and Poland’s economic, social, political, religious and cultural histories.

Drawing on Slavs and Tatars’ multi-disciplinary practice encompassing research, installations, lecture-performances and print media, this publication embraces new contributions in the form of essays, interviews, and archival presentation on subjects that range from seventeenth-century Sarmatism to the twenty-first-century Green Movement, taking in along the way, tales of the Polish Exodus, Wojtek the bear, craft, hospitality, Passion plays and taziyeh and the political lessons of a Polish slow burn-revolution for contemporary Iran.

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China and is joined here by Agata Araszkiewicz, Ramin Jahanbegloo and Adam Michnik, Mara Goldwyn, Shiva Balaghi and Michael D. Kennedy.

Edited by Mara Goldwyn
Publisher Book Works and Sharjah Art Foundation in association with Raster, Warsaw
ISBN 9781906012427
184 pages

authors

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Hamid Dabashi: The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (2012)

This pioneering explanation of the Arab Spring will define a new era of thinking about the Middle East.

In this landmark book, Hamid Dabashi argues that the revolutionary uprisings that have engulfed multiple countries and political climes from Morocco to Iran and from Syria to Yemen, were driven by a ‘Delayed Defiance’ – a point of rebellion against domestic tyranny and globalized disempowerment alike – that signifies no less than the end of postcolonialism. Sketching a new geography of liberation, Dabashi shows how the Arab Spring has altered the geopolitics of the region so radically that we must begin re-imagining the ‘the Middle East’.

Ultimately, the ‘permanent revolutionary mood’ Dabashi brilliantly explains has the potential to liberate not only those societies already ignited, but many others through a universal geopolitics of hope.

Publisher Zed Books, 2012
ISBN 1780322232, 9781780322230
150 pages

review (Jack Farmer, Socialist Review)
interview with the author (JP O’Malley, OpenDemocracy)

publisher
google books

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