Connecting people through art 

Arash Nassiri was born in Tehran in 1986. He is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains. He lives and works in Paris, France.

Arash Nassiri is interested in the subjective reading of spaces and how the collective imaginary is shaped and represented. Drawing upon private utopias and distorted concepts, the artist refers to his films as little ‘embassies’ – autonomous spatial and temporal zones for personal memories and beliefs, shared fantasies and conspiracy theories fused together to produce fictional and somewhat hallucinatory visions. Rather than working towards a linear structure, in his films, Nassiri employs diverse vocabulary that he reconfigures with precision and embeds in the editing process. The works are comprised of found footage and other archival material which the artist then adapts using the latest IT developments within a range of documentary and cinematic genres to achieve different outcomes.

The City of Tales (2017) shares the same point of departure as Teheran-Geles(2015), an earlier production by Arash Nassiri, both works using the idea of ‘audiovisual migration’ of individual memories that have been displaced from the original context and restaged in the present. Indirectly referencing the short-lived westernisation of the Iranian capital of the 1960s and 1970s, the films look at Los Angeles as the model Western city for Teheran. Whereas Teheran-Geles (2015) reflects on the failed promises of modernisation, The City of Tales raises the question of how different modes of representation activate memories. Shot on the night of the Iranian New Year celebration, The City of Tales is an oneiric journey through the uncanny urban space in which the reminiscences of Teheran’s residents and landscapes of today’s Los Angeles fuse into a single vision. The camera follows a group of people, residents of Los Angeles, equipped with mobile phones with recorded testimonies of Iranians no longer living in their home country. They guide the viewer through the city, reciting the assembled stories in Persian dialects, for which the neon lights demarcate the physical space. In the process of separation and repetition, the language and the story disintegrate and drift apart. The visual and audio distortions evoke the loss of information in the transitory space where personal nostalgia is interwoven with fantasies of modernity.