Rozemin Keshvani

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

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, 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 performace.

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

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. 

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. 

Exhibition Organiser

Rozemin Keshvani