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Four Eastern Cartographies of Entrapment (2018) - multimedia installation (image assemblage wallpaper, diplomatic waiting-room interior-design, animated film on TV-screen) and performance-lecture, in Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah July 2018. With the input, collaboration, and support of Hoda Siahtiri (video), Jassem Hindi and Foad Farahani (text), Haram Tapes (music).

Presented in 'A Tripoli Agreement' curated by Renan Laru-an, produced by Sharjah Art Foundation and Air Arabia Sharjah July 2018
Four Eastern Cartographies of Entrapment is a creative investigation about the modes of subjectivity emergent within the postmodern Middle-East. The project is initiated by responding to dispositives and vocabularies developed in Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s work ("Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism" 2017) on subject positions that point to the exceptional diversity and heterogenous makeup of Middle Eastern cultural imaginaries.

The presentation takes the form of a “radical illusion”: installation of wallpaper cartographic mapping of poetic extremism, scenographic interior of cheap diplomatic waiting-room, rhetoric of image assemblage, video on glossy TV-screen, animated film with hypnotic exchange of ecstatic projection, and scholarly detachment in the form of performance-lecture. Investigating hostile and relaxed patterns of “contact” and “nothingness” the project itself becomes a slider between the two. It zooms in and out of knowledge and speculation about nondialogue, nonnarrative, and radical exile spaces that have emerged in eastern postmodernism


video part of 'Four Eastern Cartographies of Entrapment' multi-media installation and performance in the exhibition 'A Tripoli Agreement' 2017 Sharjah Art Foundation [music: Haram Tapes] <b>lecture performance 'The Reward of The Victim - Towards Poetic Extremism' Sina Seifee 2018 Sharjah Art Foundation</b><br /> Modernity has been a catastrophic epoch for many older ecologies of subjectivity. A process of fragmentation and destruction in which pre-modern forms of wholeness and integrity were irretrievably broken and capacities for perception were caused to “decay.” This has been extreme. And the “extreme” has produced subject positions such as: resistance-fighter, ideological dictator, artistic forerunner, experimental thinker, and different constellations of desire in the last 150 hundred years in the Middle East. In poetry, in particular, the extremist is the one who reads the meteorological signs for the coming of a devastating storm. The signs are felt and cognized as “omens”: symptoms of pestilence and plague... <b>view of the installation 'Four Eastern Cartographies of Entrapment' Sina Seifee 2018 Sharjah Art Foundation</b><br/> 'Four Eastern Cartographies of Entrapment' traverses Mohaghegh’s propositions of imaginative reservoir of political, poetic, spiritual, and aesthetic domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, experimental cinema, and extremist thought. In the form of a “staged imaginary,” it examines a Middle Eastern navigation of identity (via the concept of the ‘mask’) and its particular modest/hostile modes of resistance (via the concept of the 'text’). The method of this storytelling visits sites that Mohaghegh names as: charismatic authority under poetic articulation; chaotic imagination in contact with nothingness; the will to chaos; and fatality as moral transaction. image assemblage wallpaper 'Bad Temper - Apocalyptic Climates of Endangered Subjectivity' view of the installation 'Four Eastern Cartographies of Entrapment' Sina Seifee 2018 Sharjah Art Foundation view of the installation 'Four Eastern Cartographies of Entrapment' Sina Seifee 2018 Sharjah Art Foundation

© 2018 Sina Seifee Sharjah Art Foundation Sharjah Art Foundation