Artist Talk: Pejvak

A program of
A scaffold with, against

Thursday, July 21, 12noon–1:30pm
Online on Zoom 

Register on Eventbrite

Pejvak (Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari) present an artist talk exploring the development of their film A Passage (2018). The film, on view as part of the exhibition A scaffold with, against, examines the rapid neo-liberalization in the southern border-region of Armenia since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Following the talk, a Q&A will welcome dialogue and questions from exhibition curator Žana Kozomora alongside curator, educator, and scholar of art and architecture Amin Alsaden, as well as the audience.

A scaffold with, against is curated by Žana Kozomora, and produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto. The exhibition is on view until July 30, 2022.  

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About the Panelists

Pejvak is the long-term collaboration between Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari. 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 organizes and 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.  

Amin Alsaden is a curator, educator, and scholar of art and architecture, whose work focuses on transnational solidarities and exchanges across cultural boundaries. With a commitment to advancing social justice through the arts, Alsaden’s curatorial practice contributes to the dissemination of more diverse, inclusive, and global narratives by decentering and expanding existing canons and challenging hegemonic knowledge and power structures. He is particularly interested in how artists and architects interrogate collective agency in the public realm and level institutional critique, while envisioning novel visual and spatial responses to the experiences of alienation and belonging. Alsaden’s research explores the history and theory of modern and contemporary art and architecture globally, with specific expertise in the Arab and Muslim worlds. He has published and lectured widely.