Thursday, March 9, 6:00 PM Lambton Studio A
The Urban Prairie (2017)
Amin Nadi
FREE Admission
The Urban Prairie
All abandoned places were once active many years ago. People inhabited them or worked there, making their memories. Now these places have been abandoned or demolished. Who knows what will happen 100 years later? Perhaps what will remain is a memory of today which will build the history of our future.
Nonetheless, people are living their lives, and they may not care about the passing of time, they may not care about leaving a place which equals to leaving behind memories. “Cities are not images but living entities deeply connected to and fabricated through collective memories, social relations, and built structures expressed in material culture. But even though cities are not images, they are images before they are cities – they are imagined, dreamed and planned. “ Similar to time which is ephemeral, places are also elusive over time. Addressing “place” is similar to how we talk about passing time.
The Urban Prairie (2017) is an audio/video installation including 4 video and audio channels by Amin Nadi, with music by Dave Bergeron. With this piece, the artist explores the hidden and forgotten corners and squares of 4 different sites that have been abandoned and demolished, or no longer exist.
Amin Nadi (1988) was born in Yazd, Iran. He started photography in 2005 around the time he was attending the Iranian Youth Cinema Society. Going to the Iran Broadcasting University, piqued his interest in documentary film making, while he was ameliorating his artistic, technical and historical perspective on photography. He continued his work focusing on social documentaries, street photography and urban landscapes in order to meet his fine art and journalistic goals. Additionally, he conceived of, shot and edited a 27-minute documentary film, “Hard Candy”, as his undergraduate final project. He is an award winning and shortlisted photographer whose work has been highlighted at several local and international photo festivals and exhibitions including; Six Weeks of Iranian Art in Canada, Focus Iran Exhibition in Los Angeles, Asahi Shimbun of Japan, Sony World Photography Awards, International Photography Festival of Abu Dhabi (HIPA), The 12th Iranian biennial of photography and Fadjr International Visual Arts Festival. His works have been published in National Geographic Magazine, Getty Reportage, The Guardian, and Life Force Magazine in addition to local magazines namely; Chideman. He has been a contributing photographer in several online auctions of the Seyhoun Art Gallery, located in Tehran, Iran. Other aspects of his artistic career include filmmaking, videography, video editing, researching, writing, and translation. Currently, he is a freelance new media installation artist with a goal to experience a deeper exploration in documentary mediums focusing on multidisciplinary approaches in the Film and Media Arts graduate program at the University of Windsor.
