hanaei and montazami

2022 BMW ART MAKERS

PROGRAM WINNERS

ARASH HANAEI AND MORAD MONTAZAMI

SUBURBAN HAUNTOLOGY

CLOÎTRE SAINT-TROPHIME

4 JULY - 25 SEPTEMBER 2022

09.00 AM - 07.00 PM

The BMW ART MAKERS program enables a duo, consisting of an emerging artist and a curator (applying together), to produce an experimental work related to contemporary image-making and installation. Artist Arash Hanaei and curator Morad Montazami, the first duo to win the prize, present the exhibition Suburban Hauntology. The project is a reconsideration of our relationship to forms of utopian architecture from the 1960-70s, and the peripheral ecosystems of the suburbs that accommodate them, by immersing them in the virtual world of the metaverse and augmented reality. According to the duo, it is “an innovative installation project, offering poetry and a visual policy that considers the spectator’s emancipation in an era of image capture, big data and algorithmic warfare”. Thus, the Internet finds a speculative double, a trick mirror of its standardized landscapes in the suburbs; and the suburbs find in the Internet a time machine, the unexpected, perhaps indecipherable extension of its vanished utopias.

EXHIBITION PRODUCED BY BMW ARTS MAKERS.

ARASH HANAEI

Born 1978 in Tehran, Iran.
Lives and works in Paris, France.

Artist Arash Hanaei was raised and educated in Tehran. Combining different media and methods, his work has progressively shifted away from documentary toward intermedia speculation and post-internet strategies.

MORAD MONTAZAMI

Born 1981 in Paris, France.
Lives and works in Paris, France.

Morad Montazami is an art historian, editor, and exhibition curator. He was Middle East and North Africa research curator for the Tate Modern, London, from 2014 to 2019. He has since developed the publishing and curating platform Zamân Books & Curating, which studies and promotes Arab, African, and Asian modernities.