Pocket Folklore

SAVVY Contemporary and Edith-Russ-Haus cordially invite you to the Berlin launch of Shirin Sabahi’s monograph Pocket Folklore. The book and the two films revolve around a sculpture by artist Noriyuki Haraguchi, permanently installed at the atrium of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art since the museum’s inauguration in 1977. Titled Matter and Mind, the sculpture is a steel basin filled with highly reflective reused engine oil. Over time the oil pool became a receptacle for coins and other pocketable objects thrown in by the visitors, and a witness to four decades of the city´s and the museum´s history. Forty years after its inception, Sabahi met with Haraguchi and initiated the restoration of the oil pool, which resulted in the dredging up of the motley keepsakes from under its illusive surface. The project’s focus on Matter and Mind's genesis and lifespan speaks of how artistic research and creation is entangled with the institutional history of a nation; itself recorded in the art objects´memory.

Shirin Sabahi is an artist and filmmaker and a recipient of the 2017 Media Art Grant from the Foundation of Lower Saxony at the Edith-Russ-Haus. She has exhibited this body of work at Edith-Russ-Haus in Oldenburg, Centro Botín in Santander, The Mosaic Rooms in London and Jameel Art Center in Dubai. She lives in Berlin where she hosts PLACES, a nomadic series of events where speakers are invited to present a place, imagined or otherwise.