Rozemin Keshvani

ZAMANA SPACE

 13 - 29 April 2018 

Celebrating the diamond jubilee of His Highness the Aga Khan, Zamana Space opened on 13th April with Jubilee Arts UK, a multi-media group exhibition showcasing the wealth of creative talent and imagination shaping the Ismaili Musilim community today. Artists, professional and amateur, representing all ages and backgrounds created works, taking inspiration from one of four themes, Time Legacy Aspiration and Devotion.

Bringing together over 400 works, representing a range of media and  subjects, Zamana Space expressed the history and emotion of the Muslim disapora. A sense of identity , a shared legacy -- a geographically, linguistically and ethnically diverse peoples, often from regions embroiled in post-colonial politics, this exhibition explored a rich and extraordinary past, at times painful, yet always remarkable, whose strength and unity is founded upon a single faith, to take us on a journey that aspires toward the sublime through hope, understanding and knowledge. 

Curators

Rozemin Keshvani

Amin Pardham

LG LONDON

17 September - 12 November, 2016

Werner Schreib was an important rising star in the post-war German art scene whose contributions were prematurely cut short when he died suddenly in a fatal collision with a jack-knifed lorry on the autobahn at the age of 44. Although World War Two officially ended in 1945, the process of unravelling the legacy of that war continues to this day, with repercussions and resonances that, like aftershocks, reverberate indiscriminately and uncontrollably, sometimes producing effects deeper and more devastating than the earthquake itself. 

The full extent of the atrocities committed in that war and their implications still remain shrouded in a veil of mass silence. Despite the lessons of World War Two, the technologies of death and genocide that foster ‘terminal culture’ spiral out of control. This  exhibition is situated within this urgent context, presenting work that responds to ‘terminal culture’ and breaks the silence in which terminal culture incubates and reproduces itself. 

Curator

Rozemin Keshvani

 TRONDHEIM KUNSTMUSEUM 

22 February - 14 April 2014

ZKM CENTER FOR ART & MEDIA

29 September 2012 - 22 January 2013 

FLAT TIME HOUSE

29 June -30 July 2012

In  the 1950's and 1960's, London was the site of a transatlantic cultural revolution,  setting off a radical reformulating of the possible in artistic creativity. United in their distrust of well-established cultural norms and the accepted canons of art, the post-war generation of  artists, poets and writers found new ways to express the truth of their experience. The result was an explosion in time-based art forms - film, events, actions, conceptual art, process-based practices and performance.

Many of these artists first met one another taking refuge the Charing  Cross bookstore, known as Better Books. Dubbed "the most important bookshop of its generation", Better Books became haven, platform and voice for the radical spirit of London.

Featuring works from John Latham, Gustav Metzger, Jeff Nuttall, Jeffrey Shaw, Stephen Dwoskin, Allen Ginsberg, Annea Lockwood, Pip Benveniste, the People Show, DIAS and William Burroughs, this exhibition presents for the first time the artworks, films, and poetry that bore witness to this movement, together with rarely seen photographs, ephemera and documentation. 

Curator

Rozemin Keshvani

 LAURE GENILLARD GALLERY

17 September - 12 November, 2016 

Annea Lockwood's sound sculpture 'DUSK' is an environmental sound work that unearths hidden and inaudible sonic phenomena generated through underground explosions from seabed ‘black smoker’ hydrothermal vents normally only accessible by seismologists. Lockwood has transposed these frequencies to the audible range focusing a listening experience on that which may not otherwise be heard and creating a work that gives us a glimpse into the hidden voice of the planet we call Earth.

The artist was active in the 1966  Destruction in Arts Symposium, producing a piano destruction piece with Ralph Ortiz. For Lockwood, who has a deep interest in our relationship to the ecology of the planet, the destruction of the piano was as much about the artist’s effort to explore uncharted languages of composition as it was about deconstructing the canon and culture of the piano itself.

Curator

Rozemin Keshvani

ISMAILI CENTRE 

20th October - 15 November, 2016 

The Writing of Art offers a glimpse into contemporary art approaches influenced by traditional arts based on Persian and Arabic script,  bringing together the work of Graham Day, Hanieh Delecroix, Parastou Forouhar, Farnaz Jahanbin and Katayoun Rouhi.

Providing a window into the infinitely variable interpretations and articulations of the art of writing, the exhibition highlights the plasticity between word, idea and image, traditionally juxtaposed as discrete systems of the visual and the discursive.  On view together for the first time in the contemplative halls of the Ismaili Centre, these works create a moving poetic dialogue that implicitly weaves culture and history with the ineffable and the sublime. 

Curators

Rose Issa, Rozemin Keshvani 

& Amin Abdulla-Pardham

LG LONDON

28 September - 21 December 2013

exploding utopiα  is a group exhibition exploring the contradictions, complexities and convolutions exposed through artist renderings of the ‘explosive’ and the deployment of explosive materials. The exhibition brings together a selection of international contemporary artists who have critically engaged with explosives and explosive powders in order to explore what it means to create.

Featuring work and materials from James Acord, Michelangelo Antonioni, Fiona Banner, Anne Bean, Tim Burns, Paul Burwell, Stephen Cripps, Ivor Davies, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Enrico Gaido, The Bow Gamelan, Gustav Metzger, Mariele Neudecker, Cornelia Parker, William Raban, Werner Schrieb, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Wilson and others, the exhibition includes art, film, documentation and time-base sculptural works and events from the 1960s to the present day.

Curator

Rozemin Keshvani   

The room is filled with a marginalised violence, the floor littered with the memories of physical violations. Large sheets of brown parcel paper mostly crumpled, some packed into lugubrious misshapen balls, limbless anthropomorphic forms.  (continued)

The readymade, monochromatic colours and minimalist ideas are all embedded in works which John Nixon  characterises as ‘non-objective constructed paintings’. Nixon, whose shows are self-curated (read more)

Gustav Metzger died yesterday at the age of 90. His immovable resolve to resist the art market and his deep and unyielding belief that art is and must be politically and socially engaged are commitments from which he never wavered. Here was an artist with an unrelenting resolve to 'rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light.' (continued)

Painted in black, graffiti-like on a wall outside the Longside Gallery  are the letters 'Wp Wp Wp' onomatopoeia for the sound made by helicopter blades as they whoop-whoop through the air. It is playful, mischievous, yet ominously suggestive of a sound we equate with danger, apprehension, even fear.   (continued)

Pip Benveniste involvements and collaborations with contemporaries place her among the most avant-garde of British artists who were searching for new ways of responding the experience of life during and after World War II...(continued)

Silent Explosion is an ambitious exhibition of the work and life of Ivor Davies set against the backdrop of the artist’s meticulously assembled archive, the jewel of which is unquestionably Davies’ exceptional collection of materials from the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium. 

(read more)