During the fellowship at the Graduate School Azin Feizabadi continues working on his longterm research framework A COLLECTIVE MEMORY. His artistic and academic activities –collaborative workshops as well as studio based aesthetic film-form research– undertaken within the fellowship will culminate in a feature length film named UCHRONIA..

A COLLECTIVE MEMORY was launched in 2009 as an intuitive response to the socio-political transformations in Iran and further of the Middle East. The approach of this framework –defined through a series of video and film works– is characterized by the use of a poetic grammar to combat the three-act-narrative structure of (his)story telling and by capturing and collecting dreams, subjective stories and subconscious facts from the past, present and future historical events.

Swaying between fiction and reality, aesthetics and politics, films and videos within the A COLLECTIVE MEMORY series aim to connect various transitional moments in modern history by using a personal –and sometimes emotional– lens. A COLLECTIVE MEMORY looks for alternative ways of historiography that are based on notions of ‘projection’, ‘specters’ and ‘time travel’, instead of merely foreseeing the past.

Watch A Collective Memory: A Process of Construction in Constant Deconstruction at Salon for Aesthetic Experiments, House of World Cultures Berlin.

UCHRONIA (the film) depicts two Dark Matter aliens named Layla & Majnun who emigrate to planet 52°N 13°E –with the aim to union amorously. Only the assimilation into human bodies will enable them their wish. But soon they face contradictions between the inner psyche and the outer representation of the bodies they have assimilated themselves into.

Azin Feizabadi, born in Tehran/Iran, is a Berlin based filmmaker and visual artist. He graduated in 2009 with a Meisterschüler degree from the University of the Arts (UdK) Berlin, and in 2011 with an MFA from The New School in New York.

Azin Feizabadi’s latest feature film CRYPTOMNESIA has premiered in 2014 at RWE Kino Museum Ostwall Dortmund; the mid-length film CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS premiered in 2012 at Berlinale Forum Expanded, and the short film THE NEGOTIATION (in collaboration with Kaya Behkalam) was shown at HKW Berlin in 2010 on the occasion of the exhibition ‘On Rage’.

azinfeizabadi.com