Screening & Talk

The Canadian-Iranian artist Rah Eleh is presenting her video works “Celestial Throne” in the Kreativraum next to the Galerie im Körnerpark. As part of the exhibition, there will be a conversation followed by a Q&A with Rah Eleh and curator Kathy-Ann Tan.

Rah’s work critically engages heterogeneous speculative practices, their role in maintaining ethnic nationalism, and championing techno-utopianism.
“Celestial Throne” parodies the tropes endemic to a classic game show, specifically Jeopardy!, where clues are provided and contestants guess the
answers. The clues in the game show expose coded internet dialect, iconography, memes, and aesthetics used by far right hate groups to disseminate the movement’s political ideologies, spread messages of animosity and to lure recruits. The work features a series of characters all performed by the artists. The characterizations deconstruct racial stereotypes, while the videos are a pointed critique of far-right internet extremism.

Dr. Rah Eleh (b.1985 in Iran) earned her doctoral degree from the Angewandte University of Applied Arts Vienna, is a visual artist and the founder and director of Saloon Toronto. She has exhibited at the National Museum of Norway, Cairotronica (Egypt), the Venice Biennale (ECC, Palazzo Mora), Vögele Kultur Zentrum (Pfäffikon, Switzerland), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Kunsthalle Wien, and the Onassis Cultural Centre (Athens), amongst others. Rah Eleh has taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the European Cultural Center, and the University of Toronto, and has lectured at NYU, Pace University,
Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and Alfred University. She is represented by de Montigny Contemporary and Vtape, Canada's leading artist-owned distributor of video art.

Kathy-Ann Tan is a Berlin-based independent curator, writer and founder of Mental Health Arts Space, a non-profit project arts space that centers the mental health, knowledge, histories and narratives of BIPoC, queer and minoritized artists. She is interested in alternative and sustainable forms of art dissemination, cultural production and institution-building committed to issues of social justice beyond a merely representational model of identity politics. Her practice revolves around creating spaces for community, exchange, conversation, connection and empowerment for artists in Berlin and beyond.