Book Launch & Listening Session
Hangar presents the book launch and accompanying listening session of If Need Be, a monograph by Pejvak (Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson).
September 26th, 6 pm
If Need Be presents a constellation of stories about water scarcity in the arid regions of Central Asia, ancient Persia, and the American Great Plains. Artist duo Pejvak strings together a series of hallucinatory events involving artificial glaciers, dams and other human attempts to bring water under control. Giving equal weight to gossip, legend and historical fact, Pejvak takes the role of an unreliable narrator, situating the struggle for water within the struggle for the historical record.
This publication was made as a continuation of If Need Be, an exhibition by Pejvak at Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture, Hasselt, Belgium (12.06. – 22.08.2021). The exhibition was curated by Tim Roerig.
Pejvak is the long-term collaboration between Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari since 2014. Through their multivalent, intuitive approach to research and living they find themselves in a convergence and entanglement with like-minded collaborators, histories and various geographies.
Rouzbeh Akhbari is an artist working in video installation and film. His practice is research-driven and usually exists at the intersections of political economy, critical architecture and planning. Through a delicate examination of the violences and intimacies that occur at the boundaries of lived experience and constructed histories, Akhbari uncovers the minutiae of power that regiments the world around us.
Felix Kalmenson is an artist whose practice navigates installation, video and performance. Kalmenson’s work variably narrates the liminal space of a researcher’s and artist’s encounter with landscape and archive. By bearing witness to everyday life, and hardening the more fragile vestiges of private and collective histories through their work, Kalmenson gives themselves away to the cadence of a poem, always in flux.
