Rouzbeh Shadpey

Close-up image of elderly hands counting a lime green tespih against a backdrop consisting of a white button down shirt layered under a white knit cardigan.

Rouzbeh Shadpey

Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, writer, and musician with a doctorate in medicine and indefatigable fatigue. His work explores (anti)colonial pathophysiologies of illness and weariness, with a focus on the aesthetics and poetics of diagnosis. Rouzbeh's musical practice, under the name GOLPESAR / گلپسر , combines avant-garde electronics, scraped guitar, spoken word, and Iranian sonics. Rouzbeh has exhibited and performed at TULCA, documenta fifteen, Mosaic Rooms, Centre Clark, MUTEK, Suoni Per Il Popolo, and more. His writing has been published in a variety of artistic and para-academic journals. He lives between Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal and Berlin.

Forgetting Is The Sun, 2023

A video-essay that seeks to restore dignity to the act of forgetting. The video-essay juxtaposes footage from the artist's grandmother—who remains silent in the face of a medical memory test being administered to her by an acousmatic narrator—with borrowed footage from two essay films which challenge state sanctioned regimes of remembering: the Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1962), and the Moroccan poet, filmmaker, and writer Ahmed Bouanani’s Mémoire 14 (1967). Weaving together the falsely dichotomized registers of biological memory and collective history, Forgetting is the Sun recontextualizes Farrokhzad and Bouanani’s defiance of state sanctioned remembrance through the lens of individual forgetting—and its resistance to medical capture.

Image: Still from Rouzbeh Shadpey, Forgetting Is the Sun, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Gallery: TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building, St Augustine St, Galway
Dates: 4-19 November | Mon-Sun 12-6pm
Tickets: Free

Access: TULCA Gallery is a step-free venue, which has accessible toilet facilities. There are three accessible parking spots located on Saint Augustine Street opposite the TULCA Gallery. The film time is captioned. Seating provided.