79.89.09
4 - 5pm
Lecture by Slavs and Tatars
17.03.11
Ceramics House, Heritage Area
Only solidarity and patience will secure our victory
Billboard, 5946 x 2968mm
Eastside Projects, Birmingham, 2011
Via a multiplatform project that is part archival, part affective research and original work, "Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz"traces an ambitious, if counter-intuitive, genealogy between Iran and Poland. From 17th century Sarmatism – the dominant cultural and lifestyle ideology amongst the Polish nobility – to monobrows in America to the Green movement in present-day Iran, the project began as an investigation into two key modern moments for "79.89.09" – the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and Poland’s Solidarnosc 1980s movement – as bookends to the two major geopolitical narratives of the last and current century – the communist project in the 20th and Islamic modernism in the 21st. In an attempt to bring the polemical and poetic together, Slavs and Tatars look to the revolutionary potential of certain crafts and folklore behind the ideological impulse of 1979 and 1989.
