IF NEED BE by Pejvak
with a presentation by Rouzbeh Akhbari at 8.30pm
Thursday June 6, 8pm
If Need Be presents a constellation of stories about water scarcity in the arid regions of Central Asia, ancient Persia, and the American Great Plains. Artist duo Pejvak strings together a series of hallucinatory events involving artificial glaciers, dams and other human attempts to bring water under control. Giving equal weight to gossip, legend and historical fact, Pejvak takes the role of an unreliable narrator, situating the struggle for water within the struggle for the historical record.
This publication was made as a continuation of If Need Be, an exhibition by Pejvak at Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture, Hasselt, Belgium (12.06. – 22.08.2021). The exhibition was curated by Tim Roerig.
Pejvak is the long-term collaboration between Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari since 2014. Through their multivalent, intuitive approach to research and living they find themselves in a convergence and entanglement with like-minded collaborators, histories and various geographies.
Building Fictions (BF) is a publishing project that sets out to explore ‘building’ as a methodology, with the intent to highlight the potential of storytelling within practices at the intersection of art, design, architecture, literature. Not limited by the first definition of a building as a space, BF is interested in collaboration as an assembling, layering process. While investigating fictional strategies and their potential within artistic production, BF wants to find out where those strategies are at play in the context of real constructions, could those be made of concrete or be more ephemeral, metaphorical, thus anchoring the effects of fictions within the real world.