Where is the Friend’s House + Shorts
Sun 28 JunThis film programme conceived by curator Anne-Sophie Dinant in collaboration with artist Armineh Neghadari extends Negahdari’s exhibition The Living River at Cell Project Space into the cinematic realm, reflecting the poetic foundations of her drawing practice.
Cinema plays a significant role in Negahdari’s thinking and artistic process and the films included in the programme invite the viewer to make connections with her exhibition. Central to the programme is Where Is the Friend’s House? by Abbas Kiarostami, a film that formally resonates with her aesthetics and profound link to poetry. Negahdari’s work, like Kiarostami’s cinema, is grounded in minimal forms, creating a free space for emotion and imagination.
More widely, the programme reflects Negahdari’s interest in experimental artists’ films that embody poetic forms.
Across these works, the programme traces a common language to two distinct artistic practices. A language rooted in poetry, allowing for an evocative power of images.
Introduction
The screening will be introduced by Anne-Sophie Dinant, the curator of the film programme.
Programme
Feature Film
Where Is the Friend’s House?
- Director(s): Abbas Kiarostami
- Cast: Babak Ahmadpour, Ahmed Ahmadpour, Khodabakhsh Defai, Iran Outari
- Country, year: Iran, 1987
- Duration: 83 mins
- Language: Persian with EN subtitles
- More information: Colour
The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s interlacing trilogy of films set in the northern Iranian village of Koker takes a premise of fable-like simplicity and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of the everyday. Where is the Friend’s House? revealed Kiarostami as one of the most interesting filmmakers of his generation.
Short Films
Kiri (A Tree in the Fog)
- Director(s): Takahiko Iimura
- Country, year: Japan, 1970
- Duration: 5 mins
- More information: b&w, silent
Experimental filmmaker Takahiko Iimura is filming white scenes in which faintly seen trees are blown by wind through fog and suddenly dissolve into a pure white, like in San-Sui-Ga white landscape drawings.
Hands
- Director(s): Stella F. Simon and Miklós Bándy
- Country, year: Germany, 1928
- Duration: 13 mins
- Language: German intertitles with EN subtitles
- More information: b&w
Conceived by American photographer Stella F. Simon and directed by Hungarian-born writer Miklós Bándy, this short film inspired by dance uses hands to evoke human characters.
Plaisirs d’Amour en Iran
- Director(s): Agnès Varda
- Cast: Valérie Mairesse, Ali Rafie, Thérèse Liotard
- Country, year: Isafahan, 1976
- Language: French with EN subtitles
- Duration: 6 mins
- More information: Colour
Blending documentary and fiction. Varda presents a reflection on human relationships. Visual architectural details of Persian architecture become a vehicle for poetic expressions with humour and detachment.
Armineh Negahdari, (b.1994, Tehran) lives and works in Bordeaux. The artist presents her current solo exhibition ‘The Living River’ at Cell Project Space, London. Other current solo exhibitions include ‘What Colour Is Your Sky Today?’ at OPEN SPACE #18, Louis Vuitton Foundation, presented in partnership with S.M.A.K. Ghent (in 2027).
Anne-Sophie Dinant is an independent curator based in Bordeaux and Paris. She was previously curator at large at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and associate curator at South London Gallery, London.
Organised in partnership with Cell Project Space, with the generous support of Elephant Trust and Fluxus Art Projects
