The House Is Black

Director: Forough Farrokhzad
Iran, 1962, 20', HDD, b&w
Persian with Turkish subtitles 

For the first time in Turkey, at Pera Film with its restored copy!

This documentary short, the only film made by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, is one of the very first film essays and qualifies as a precursor to the Iranian New Wave. The House Is Black captures life in the Baba Baghi leper colony, a small village where the inhabitants live from day to day. They go to the market, eat, knit, smoke and play board games. Meanwhile, the children go to school. Some of them are visibly affected by the disease while others look healthy—for now, at least. Farrokhzad’s voice-over provides the images with poetic commentary in which she mixes texts from the Bible and the Koran with her own poetry. A succession of attentive black-and-white shots endows the deformities with their own beauty and melds together daily moments of pain, despair, warmth and joy into a profoundly human document.

The House Is Black

The House Is Black

Memory Surfaces and Mental Prayers

Memory Surfaces and Mental Prayers

The Diaspora Suite - Forged Ways

The Diaspora Suite - Forged Ways

The Diaspora Suite - American Hunger

The Diaspora Suite - American Hunger

The Diaspora Suite - Many Thousands Gone

The Diaspora Suite - Many Thousands Gone

The Diaspora Suite - Kindah

The Diaspora Suite - Kindah

The Diaspora Suite - Fluid Frontiers

The Diaspora Suite - Fluid Frontiers

Good News from the Skies

Good News from the Skies

Inspired by the exhibition And Now the Good News, which focusing on the relationship between mass media and art, we prepared horoscope readings based on the chapters of the exhibition. Using the popular astrological language inspired by the effects of the movements of celestial bodies on people, these readings with references to the works in the exhibition make fictional future predictions inspired by the horoscope columns that we read in the newspapers with the desire to receive good news about our day. 

Symbols

Symbols

Pera Museum’s Cold Front from the Balkans exhibition curated by Ali Akay and Alenka Gregorič brings together contemporary artists from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia.

Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel

Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel

In 1998 Ben Jakober and Yannick Vu collaborated on an obvious remake of Marcel Duchamp’s Roue de Bicyclette, his first “readymade” object. Duchamp combined a bicycle wheel, a fork and a stool to create a machine which served no purpose, subverting accepted norms of art.