f/stop Festival für Fotografie Leipzig
During the 2016 edition of f/stop Festival für Fotografie Leipzig BOESKE & HOFLAND is proud to present an exhibition featuring Iranian photographers Mohsen Rastani and Tahmineh Monzavi.
MOHSEN RASTANI
born 1958 in Iran
photojournalist and documentary filmmaker
Rastani studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Tehran where he is currently working as a teacher. He won several awards and has participated in many exhibition in and outside Iran. Recently his work was on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and at the MAXXI in Rome as part of the traveling group exhibition Unedited History, Iran 1960-2014 curated by Vali Mahlouji. In January 2015 Mohsen Rastani also took part in the exhibition Opening Up: 9 Artists from Iran at Francis Boekse Projects in Amsterdam.
Over the last twenty years, Mohsen Rastani (1958) has taken black and white photographs of people in war zones. Before going to art school he visited countries like Bosnia Herzegovina, Iraq and Lebanon where he took pictures of ordinary people: families and soldiers, refugees and workers with only one mission: trying to capture the soul of men, women and children in times of war. Rastani transforms the street into his studio. He invites people he meets to pose in front of a white sheet he always brings along. “The backdrop”, he says, “isolates people better in our minds, so they become eternal” (The Paris Review). Thanks to this unique approach, combining photojournalism and his artistic concept, his work is of great importance. Without using words, Rastani shows us the effects of war by simply showing people the way they are.
TAHMINEH MONZAVI
born 1988
Tahmineh Monzavi is an Iranian photographer. Monzavi has studied photography in Bachelor’s degree in Azad Art & Architecture University of Tehran. In 2005, she started her professional carreer as a documentary photographer. In 2009, she made a long documentary film about a group of addicted women who live in a shelter in the south of Tehran. The main topic she works on is social. She follows the young generation in Iranian society and evaluates the the social conflicts among them.
Her photographs have also been exhibited in some museums around the world such as the Modern Art Museum of Paris and the Literature Museum of Georgia. In the series called The Brides of Mokhber alDowleh Monzavi told the story of a very elegant work of art done by the rough hands of men. This series has been shown in Silkroad Art Gallery in Tehran as well as in Paris, Rome, Vienna, Boston and South Korea. She has also done an interesting project on transsexualism which addresses how a minority within traditional Iranian society yearns for and attempts to find a wider social acceptance and recognition. In January 2005 Tahmineh also took part in the exhibition Opening Up: 9 Artists from Iran at Francis Boeske Projects in Amsterdam.
Monzavi’s vision was changed after a month of being imprisoned; she started looking at her society differently. After a year of inactivity she began to work on project called All about me; nicknamed Queen maker in which she points out the deep feelings of womanhood and womanly dreams.
Tahmineh Monzavi is also known for the length of her projects. Since the beginning of her carreer she has been working on the subject matters in a long term. As she believes, time gives her the opportunity to observe more details about the topic and also evaluate what happens around the subject matter. Now she is working on a long interval project of photo stories about the young generation and women of Iran in various cities in Iran and Afghanistan.
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