Alireza Labeshka (Germany)
Alireza Labeshka is an Iranian curator whose main concerns are the public domain, the city’s urban transformation, and their relation to political and social issues. He obtained his MA in Art Research from Tehran Azad University and is currently working on a project called Urban Hegemony. Besides being the chief curator of KAAF Institute in Tehran, Alireza is the director of an independent art space called Raf Projects, which he established in 2012 in Tehran; collaborating and organizing more than thirty art events, Raf is now pursuing its activities in frame of an association in Berlin, and defines curatorial projects internationally. In terms of curatorial experience, he carried out projects with galleries and museums, including ZKU Berlin, M.I.A Gallery in Seattle, USA as well as curating more than ten exhibitions for Iranian galleries like Raf, Sareban, CC Isfahan, KAAF Institute and The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. He has written various articles, interviews, exhibition catalogs and art reviews for several art magazines, among them Golestaneh, Tandis and Mokkab and for the book “A Reader About Art in Iran since 1960”. Alireza has also had the opportunity to participate in residencies at the Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Warsaw, and Aedes Berlin, in collaboration with IFA. He is the co-designer of a residency program for KAAF Institute, and has invited and worked with esteemed artists like Aneta Grzeszykowska, Olaf Brzeski, Jan and Tim Edler, Geerten Verheus, Daniel Kötter and Shabahang Tayyari.
Can we consider interference of artists in public spaces, as form of social resistance? How representations of urban spaces by artists can be regarded as visual data to study socio-political implications of urban issues?