Never Been to Houston

Never Been to Houston
March 9-April 14
Lawndale Art Center, Houston, Texas
Curated by Aurora Picture Show and Jon Rubin

Imagine a city that you've only seen in reproductions or perhaps have merely heard about. A place, like many others, that exists only through rumors, stories, novels, the nightly news, magazines, movies, and the Internet. Using these secondhand clues as firsthand research material, invited worldwide contributors-who have Never Been to Houston- will photographically document (without leaving home) what they imagine Houston to look like. Contributors will upload their photos daily to an on-line Flickr site, which will be projected as a slideshow in Houston's Lawndale gallery. Anything that anyone might take a photograph of is fair game. Just as long as it feels like Houston.

For the contributors to this exhibition, the task is to search through their daily life for clues to a foreign place, for the possibility that somewhere else exists right under their nose and that, like some clunky form of astral projection, you can travel to other lands without leaving home. For viewers in Houston, it's a chance to witness an unusual mirroring of their globally projected image. In addition to the traditions of storytelling and travel guides, new information technologies are expanding the possibility of knowing a place to which you've never traveled. Three-dimensional electronic maps, 360 degree images, hosts of amateur and commercial websites and podcasts about a given city, its economy, demographics, culture and subculture have opened the way for a new vernacular of representation.

In the end, Never Been to Houston is an experimental, virtual travelogue to the city that the New York Times opines "refuses to assume a simply identity."

Amirali Ghasemi from parkingallery is also one of the invited contributers.

Limited Access in Tehran

Parkingallery with collaboration of Reloading Images Azad Art Gallery presents:
Limited access in Tehran
Video screening/Sound installation/ performance

As the world is becoming smaller and smaller for us, we still have limited access to each other, we merely understand the codes that make us able to read images, through a distance which seems very near but still so far.
Tehran would be a perfect destination for the project initiated by Parkingallery to exchange interesting examples of variety of responses to disconnection and connectivity at the same time.

Videos
Pooya Abbasian
Mania Akbari
Keyvan Azad
Carl Boutard/Magnus Thoren
Cedric Bomford
Ehsan Behmanesh
Ana Bezelga
Elham Doust Haghighi
Eva Drangensholt
Samira Eskandarfar
Farhad Fozouni
Amirali Ghasemi
M.R. Heydari
Jihaniro Ishie / Chihiro Akutsu
Fardi Jafari
Behnam Kamrani
Karri Kuoppala
Khosro Khosravi
Rokhshad Nourdeh
Mehdi Mirmohammadi
Hamed Sahihi
Behrang Samadzadegan
Rozita Sharafjahan
Jinoos Taghizadeh
Yasser raad

Performance:
Shervin Afshar

Makan Ashkewari
Sound installation
Erfan Abdi
Amirali Mohebbinejad

Special Screening*:
Maya Schweizer
Linda wallace
Sophie Hamacher
Daniel Urria
Chan-Sook-Choi
Jeannette Gaussi
Nike Arnold
Parisa Yousef Doust
Khaled Ramadan
Urania Fassoulidou

Video works from reloading Images archive.
Complied by Kaya Behkalam & Azin Feizabadi (Reloading Images, Berlin)

Venue: Azad art gallery,No 41, Salmas Sq., Golha Sq., Tehran
Opening: 8^th of March, 4-8 pm
For more information please check the project's website (available from 8^th of March)
www.parkingallery.com\limited
Info@parkingallery.com