Anahita Razmi / Group XXXVI, Apr 2013 - Sep 2013

SMILE

9/13/13 to 9/15/13

Mackey Apartments and Garages 1137 S. Cochran Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90019

Artist Anahita Razmi titled her project A Tale of Tehrangeles, modeling her construct after Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. The term "Tehrangeles" is a common, informal moniker describing an immigrant population of some 700,000 to 800,000 people, the largest Iranian settlement outside Iran. Razmi presented a visual collage of the two cities, projected on two screens. She combined and juxtaposed images shot in Los Angeles and Tehran, creating territorial blurrings and spatial connections/disconnections/negations. In addition to the video installation, she collected newspaper headlines that originally contained the words "Tehran" or "Los Angeles" and replaced each of these with the word "Tehrangeles," thereby broaching issues of territorial attributes and histories.