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Els Vanden Meersch / Mastering The Curtains
Els Vanden Meersch / Mastering The Curtains
Els Vanden Meersch / Mastering The Curtains
Els Vanden Meersch / Mastering The Curtains
Els Vanden Meersch / Mastering The Curtains
Els Vanden Meersch / Mastering The Curtains
Els Vanden Meersch / Mastering The Curtains
Els Vanden Meersch / Mastering The Curtains

Els Vanden Meersch

Mastering The Curtains

€18,00
17 × 24 cm, 92 p, ills colour, paperback
ISBN 9789490800611
design: 6m56s
language: English
edition of 500
March 2017

'Mastering the Curtains' is the result of an intensive research of 2 perspectives in the Islamic Republic of Iran: on the one hand the public and transparent, on the other hand the hidden. The first approach focuses on the content and implementation in the public space of the old popular and politicized street theatre Tazi’yeh. The second approach explores the hidden world of the Sufis and their political difficulties within the current policy. Originally, these seeming opposites have common ground in Iranian collective memory through a rendition of social and spiritual resistance. The four-year research process involved continuous oscillation between exploration and self-reflection. Reflections on religion, other and I, position and opposition, private and public, transparency and control are combined with series of images as in a ‘flow of consciousness’. The social potential of secular mysticism is distilled from this research.

With the support of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.

In Vanden Meersch' practice, architecture has a meaning far beyond the discipline that combines aesthetics with functionality. Buildings mirror existential social behavior; they contain both bottom up and top down social activities and structures. Vanden Meersch is interested in types of buildings that, because of their functional nature, reveal our social interhuman convictions. These places are hard to remove after transformation of a specific ideological era therefore they fossilize what often wants to be forgotten or monumentalize what is suppose to be our pride.