How Two Artists Meticulously Reproduced a Tehran Apartment Gallery in Pittsburgh as a Way Around the Iranian Travel Ban

Iranian artist Sohrab Kashani lives in Tehran, but you can visit
his apartment—which serves as a contemporary art venue as well as
his home—in Pittsburgh, where The Other
Apartment is on view at the Mattress Factory.

The project, a collaboration with artist Jon Rubin, features a
scaled reproduction of Kashani’s home, and the artists will stage
matching exhibitions and events in identical spaces some 6,300
miles apart.

“With the past month of near war between our countries hanging
over us, we have been questioning whether what we are doing is a
bit absurd,” the pair said in a joint email interview with Artnet
News. But the project has a bigger purpose. “By replicating an
entire space from Iran in the US, The Other Apartment has
functioned as our loophole around the travel ban.”

Before the ban, Kashani visited Rubin in Pennsylvania in 2016.
“I was denied a visa in 2017 for my second visit to the US, which
was after the ban had taken effect,” Kashani said. “Because I
wasn’t able to travel to the US, and in many ways, the project has
become the simplest way for Jon and me to continue working together
in the same place.”

Despite the distance that separates the two, they have been
regular collaborators since first meeting in 2008, the year that
Kashani opened his home as a nonprofit art space, called Sazmanab
after the street he lives on.

When Rubin and Dawn Weleski launched Conflict
Kitchen, a stand serving food from countries in conflict with
the US, Iran cuisine was the first that was featured. Kashani was
an important partner, helping host a dinner party bridging
Pittsburgh and Tehran with a live Skype projection.

“We’ve been working on these interconnected projects for quite
some time, always trying to bridge space through embodied
experiences,” Rubin said.

The two had been considering the project for some seven years.
It was first conceived as a sort of sci-fi sitcom, inspired by the
fact that they both grew up watching American television. They
still might make the show, which would center on a family unaware
that its home is simultaneously located in both the US and
Iran.

“As friends living inside two countries in conflict with each
other, our lack of power and agency is simply maddening sometimes,”
they said. “So we decided we would create a world for ourselves
where everything that was a limit would became a possibility, and
everything that was a political obstacle would became a creative
opportunity.”

There were physical obstacles, too, in constructing The
Other Apartment. The Pittsburgh gallery was two feet smaller
than Kashani’s apartment, which meant scaling everything down
slightly. And neither artist had visited the other space, which
meant relying on spreadsheets, photographs, and sketches to
accurately build the apartment’s facade, its interior architecture,
and all the things within it.

“It took us four months of solid work with a team of builders
and fabricators to meticulously recreate the apartment,” they said.
“We addressed the challenge of replication in many ways, including
hand-making Sohrab’s dining room table, bedroom dresser, office
bookcase, even air conditioner and radiator.” Books were scanned,
rugs were photographed and reproduced, and other assorted objects
were analyzed in Iran and 3-D printed in Pittsburgh.

It was also uncharted personal territory for Kashani. “Going
public is never easy, especially if you are an introvert who lives
in Iran, but to me this act of sharing is necessary and urgent,” he
said. “I hope it communicates who I am as a person, my naked and
uncensored truth, and invites others to do the same as well.”

The programming—including a performance in both cities
where musicians played covers of songs from a cassette tape that a
mysterious visitor left behind in Pittsburgh—is just as ambitious
as the building project was.

“With a little research, we discovered that the tape was
secretly left on a shelf by the lead singer of a Mexican band,” the
artists said. “We immediately loved the idea that a Mexico City
band thought that leaving a demo tape in a Pittsburgh replica of a
Tehran apartment would be a good promotional idea.”

“The Other Apartment / Sohrab Kashani and Jon Rubin” is on
view at the Mattress Factory, 505 Jacksonia Street, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, September 27, 2019–September 5, 2020.

The post How Two Artists Meticulously Reproduced a Tehran
Apartment Gallery in Pittsburgh as a Way Around the Iranian Travel
Ban appeared first on artnet News.