AT THE DISPOSAL OF HUMANITY
Curated by Lila Nazemian, ArteEast Special Projects Curator
Featuring works by Shadi Harouni, Daniel Asadi Faezi, Farnaz and Mohammadreza Jurabchian, Elham Hosseinzadeh, and Saeed Dehghani.
AT THE DISPOSAL OF HUMANITY presents films made in the past two decades that share perspectives from communities on the periphery of contemporary Iranian society. With a focus on some of the many ethnic minorities living in Iran, the films in this program explore aspects of their deep-seated roots to land, relationships to their ecological environments, and their various struggles for justice against systemic oppression.
The films in this program explore aspects of various communities’ relationships to nature, the politics of labor, and social values while simultaneously highlighting their distinct cultural, linguistic and musical heritages. Mountains, deserts, forests, wetlands, lakes and seas have always transcended human-made frontiers. Extracted resources from these landscapes, be they water, petroleum, precious minerals or stones (among many others), rarely benefit their respective peoples who have inhabited the lands for centuries and who cannot be contained nor reduced to nation-state borders. Instead, their continued existence depends on the acute knowledge of their territories and the natural resources at their disposal, which have historically been the target of profit-seeking government forces. This furthermore echoes the ongoing oppression that these communities have faced in their unwavering individual and collective struggles for justice.
