News From Tehran, is a curatorial project that was developed through exchange and in close collaboration with a group of Iranian photographers, filmmakers and theatre practitioners.

This first edition of the project is presented in February 2004 in Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The exhibition and screenings was paralleled with the publication of the first issue of Pages magazine ‘Public & Private.’

The project attempts to work with different representations dealt with in the work of the artists involved. News From Tehran can be seen as part of Pages’ broader concern with investigating how artistic practices (in Iran) are both constituted by and seek to address their specific socio-political conditions. The narratives these exhibited works communicate are often themselves marked by aesthetic and historical difference and dissonance and as such, they not only resist contemporary art’s preconceptions of cultural locality but also tend to escape becoming mere examples of cultural difference.

Akram Mahmoudian