Ala Ebtekar is joined by his mother, artist and translator Mojdeh Marashi, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of NASA’s Apollo 11 moon landing and discuss its relation to Thirty-six Views of the Moon, 2019, on view in What is an edition, anyway?. The two present a poetry reading featuring poems by Ebtekar’s great-uncle, H.E. Sayeh, whose texts comprise some found pages used in Ebtekar’s project. The work is the Spring edition of a series in four seasons that takes its cue from a twelfth century poem by Omar Khayyam that imagines humans as the objects of the Moon’s omnipresent gaze. Using photographic negatives of the Moon provided by California’s Lick Observatory Archives, Ebtekar treated book and pamphlet pages from ten centuries of texts referencing the moon and night sky with photographic chemicals then exposed them to moonlight.
McEvoy Arts’ free Gallery Sessions invite artists and curators to explore and contemplate their works on view with visitors in an intimate setting.
Takes place during the 2019 San Francisco Art Book Fair.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978) is a visual artist who works primarily in painting, drawing, photography, and installation between his native San Francisco Bay Area and Tehran, Iran. Born to Iranian activist/artist parents, he developed an interest in various notions of in-betweenness, which has led him to explore the juncture between history, myth, and culture. Ebtekar’s works are included in the collections of BAMPFA, Berkeley; Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India; de Young Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among other institutions. He teaches in Stanford University’s Department of Art & Art History, Institute for Diversity in the Arts, and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies, where he leads the Art, Social Space, and Public Discourse Initiative.