SOHRAB SHAHID SALESS: EXILE, DISPLACEMENT AND THE STATELESS MOVING IMAGE Friday 19th January 2018, Goethe-Institut London, UK Keynote speaker: Prof. Hamid Naficy (Northwestern)
Deadline for submission: 15th October 2017
This one-day conference brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the work of Iranian filmmaker Sohrab Shahid Saless (1944-1998) as conduit for a wider engagement with exiled and displaced moving image practitioners: their ethics, aesthetics, mode(s) of production as well as their precarious lives and often uncertain legacy.
We invite contributions by researchers and scholars of all backgrounds and in all stages of their careers to one of the following three sections:
• Panel 1: The life and work of Sohrab Shahid Saless In 1974, facing increasing government pressure and censorship, Shahid Saless left his native Iran – where he had realised two incisive feature films and co-founded the New Film Group – for West Germany. Without permanent residency status, locked into a continual struggle to secure funding, this self-described “guest worker” of German cinema was to create a unique but critically neglected body of films that speak forcefully to the traumas of displacement and migration.
• Panel 2: Creative exiles
This panel considers how experiences of displacement and dislocation have shaped cinema, and moving image practices more generally, throughout history; how creative exiles struggle to re- and de-construct their identities, to both produce art and re-produce their existence as artists against the complex cultural, political and economic background of their respective “host” societies. Is there a “cinema of exile”, consisting of certain aesthetic, stylistic, financial, and sociopolitical regularities?
• Panel 3: The stateless moving image
This panel confronts persistent problems concerning the archiving and transmission of the transnational film heritage – Shahid Saless’s work being a case in point. “Stateless” films, i.e. moving image works that belong to no single nation, present particular challenges for curators, archivists, researchers, and film programmers which this section seeks to address.
Please send abstracts (350 words, including bibliography) together with a short biography (no more than 150 words) to [log in to unmask] by Sunday 8th October 2017.
The conference and a retrospective of Shahid Saless’ Iranian and German films in November 2017- January 2018 are organised and curated by Dr. Azadeh Fatehrad and Nikolaus Perneczky in partnership with the Goethe-Institut London and with support from The Visual and Material Culture Research Centre, Kingston University (London) and CHASE (Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England).
For further inquiries please contact: [log in to unmask]
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