Pejvak, If Need Be (2024)

Pejvak
If Need Be
316 pages
Softcover
12 x 9 inches
2024
 
Authors: Anisa Sabiri, Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Anna Engelhardt & Sasha Shestakova), Benjamin Filler, Irakli Qolbaia, Dina Cheraghvand, Farshad Tavakoli, Masoud Borbor and Pejvak (Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson)
 
Research assistants: Dina Cheraghvand, Hamid Ghezlou, Lisa
 
Vetkhova Illuminator: Mojtaba Abu Talebi
 
Calligrapher: Javad Azari
 
Graphic design: Timur Akhmetov & Rudy Guedj
 
Editing and proofreading: Will Pollard Printer: P.B. Tisk
 
Publisher: Building Fictions (Amsterdam)
 
ISBN: 978-90-833756-1-8
 
 
If Need Be presents a constellation of stories about water scarcity in the arid regions of Central Asia, ancient Persia, and the American Great Plains. Artist duo Pejvak strings together a series of hallucinatory events involving artificial glaciers, dams and other human attempts to bring water under control. Giving equal weight to gossip, legend and historical fact, Pejvak takes the role of an unreliable narrator, situating the struggle for water within the struggle for the historical record.
 
This publication was made as a continuation of If Need Be, an exhibition by Pejvak at Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture, Hasselt, Belgium (12.06. – 22.08.2021). The exhibition was curated by Tim Roerig.
 
Pejvak is the long-term collaboration between Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari since 2014. Through their multivalent, intuitive approach to research and living they find themselves in a convergence and entanglement with like-minded collaborators, histories and various geographies.
 
 
Cover image caricatures from Farman Newspaper framed with a 1930’s Soviet agitprop fabric pattern designed by Maria Nazarevskaya depicting early cotton-harvesting machines.
 
Special thanks: Bahar Modiri, Jesse Bas, Rien Geypen, Piet Snoeks, Ali Osman Tugla, René Gilis, Emily Mckibbon, Ron Bernstein, Romy Finke, Paul John, Jung-Lee Type Foundry, Ralf Kruse, DD Custom Metal Works, Guy Evans, Milla Vigliengo, Mahboobeh Mehrbani, Bruno Alves de Almeida, Mark Zhang, Roya Marandi, and Jan Van Eyck Academie.
 
Archival images courtesy of the Botany Department at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, USA and Sovfoto Archive, McLaren Art Centre, Barrie, Canada.
 
This publication was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.